Medicine Creek Is a Paleoindian Cultural Ecotone: The Red Smoke Assemblage

Description

The southwestern Nebraska Paleoindian Red Smoke site (25FT42) is in the upper reaches of a gallery-forested river that flows east to the Mississippi, in a sheltered, well-watered niche abundant in deer, small game, vegetable foods, and local high-quality tabular stone (Smoky Hill jasper). It is a westward penetration into the High Plains, where bison were plentiful but water and good tool stone were less abundant. An estimated 98 percent of the baked stone tools found in the Red Smoke assemblage are of local jasper. The most common artifacts are debitage, bifaces rejecting several stages of reduction, and bifacial cutting and chopping tools. The site’s Zone 88 assemblage is dated to between 9000 and 8700 RCYBP. The site appears to reflect baked stone reduction activities while people were camped at the site, which was adjacent to exposed jasper bedrock. Most of the well-reduced Red Smoke bifaces are fragments that exhibit unregimented 1-cm-wide facial flake scars. A dozen or more alternate beveled Zone 88 points (that may have served as both projectiles and knives) have strong stylistic similarities to the Dalton materials found in the Mississippi River drainage farther east and south, and two of these Red Smoke tools are identical in material, technology, and reshaped form to the two artifacts found at the Meserve site in eastern Nebraska.