EARLY AND MIDDLE ARCHAIC PROJECTILE POINT TYPOLOGY AND CHRONOLOGY ACROSS THE GREAT BASIN

The impetus for writing this monograph was born out of the excavations of two remarkable sites sitting on opposite ends of the Great Basin Physiographic Province: Bonneville Estates Rockshelter in the eastern Great Basin and Huffaker Springs in the western Great Basin. While Hockett was finishing the first typological analysis of the Bonneville Estates points with Ted Goebel, Spidell and Kristina Wiggins at Kautz Environmental were struggling with the typology of some of the points at the recently excavated Huffaker Springs site located in southeast Reno. Incredibly, after many decades of research and the excavation of thousands of sites across the Great Basin, these two sites represent the oldest stratified human-occupied sites ever excavated in the eastern and western Great Basin subregions – and the typological and chronological analyses of their respective projectile points were happening at about the same time. Spidell called Hockett one afternoon in 2017 and introduced Huffaker Springs, a site that Hockett had no knowledge about. Hockett took the Dead Cedar and Leppy Hills points from Bonneville Estates to Kautz’s office in Reno and laid them on the table. The recognition of these points by Spidell and Wiggins was immediate, and something was said akin to “We have those at Huffaker Springs in the western Great Basin”. This meeting led to many more discussions and comparison of point types and metrics from the two subregions of the Great Basin. As well, Hockett was also beginning a new study obtaining additional radiocarbon dates from O’Malley Shelter and retyping all the projectile points from that site. Remarkably, despite being excavated in 1969 and 1970, O’Malley Shelter remains the oldest stratified human-occupied site ever excavated in the southeastern Great Basin. The initial thought was to publish a journal article, but once the writing began and the photographing of points commenced, it quickly grew into a manuscript that was far beyond the page limits of a journal. And since most of the sites analyzed here are located on public lands and were excavated or partially excavated with the use of public funds, we felt the best place for its publication was someplace where it would be available free of charge as a downloadable pdf file. Hence, the publication here in the Nevada Bureau of Land Management’s Technical Report Series.