Fantastic presentation Dr. Knell. After 2 to 3 field seasons spent on the Old River Bed and Bonneville playa in Utah, it is interesting to hear that the Lake Mojave tools are mostly chalcedony and chert. On the playa lakes in Utah most of the Pluvial Lake tools are obsidian and basalt. Hearing your evidence, I now chalk the material type up to "proximity" alone. By the time Holocene point types like Northern and Elko appear, basalt drops out of the record almost entirely, but basalt is common for the Pluvial Lake Sites with Stem points, Mojave/Silver Lake points. Clovis points appear to be absent on the lower shorelines of the Bonneville lake, where we find hundreds of Stem points, Silver Lakes, Pinto Points etcetera, but no Clovis. It is only found at the higher elevation sites along the far southern shoreline. The two Clovis ponts I am aware of, were both isolated artifacts likely brought in by later people. My neighbor once said he found "an arrowhead in a cave" high in the Wasatch mountains. I just about died when he showed me a 7 1/4 inch Lake Mojave Point, with a shoulder half way to the tip. That point was made of tiger chert from Wyoming. Of particular interest to me, do you find all the points on the playa surface, or is there evidence of points beneath the Younger Dryas Sediments before 11.2K (I am expecting Clovis and the earlier WST points to lye under a layer of sediment along the shoreline, possibly older like the findings at Coopers Ferry at 16,000). There was a site, a beach sand deposit in southern utah loaded with debitage under 70cm of lake sediment, but we didn't get to excavate. Thankyou for the video.
Fantastic presentation Dr. Knell. After 2 to 3 field seasons spent on the Old River Bed and Bonneville playa in Utah, it is interesting to hear that the Lake Mojave tools are mostly chalcedony and chert. On the playa lakes in Utah most of the Pluvial Lake tools are obsidian and basalt. Hearing your evidence, I now chalk the material type up to "proximity" alone. By the time Holocene point types like Northern and Elko appear, basalt drops out of the record almost entirely, but basalt is common for the Pluvial Lake Sites with Stem points, Mojave/Silver Lake points. Clovis points appear to be absent on the lower shorelines of the Bonneville lake, where we find hundreds of Stem points, Silver Lakes, Pinto Points etcetera, but no Clovis. It is only found at the higher elevation sites along the far southern shoreline. The two Clovis ponts I am aware of, were both isolated artifacts likely brought in by later people. My neighbor once said he found "an arrowhead in a cave" high in the Wasatch mountains. I just about died when he showed me a 7 1/4 inch Lake Mojave Point, with a shoulder half way to the tip. That point was made of tiger chert from Wyoming. Of particular interest to me, do you find all the points on the playa surface, or is there evidence of points beneath the Younger Dryas Sediments before 11.2K (I am expecting Clovis and the earlier WST points to lye under a layer of sediment along the shoreline, possibly older like the findings at Coopers Ferry at 16,000). There was a site, a beach sand deposit in southern utah loaded with debitage under 70cm of lake sediment, but we didn't get to excavate. Thankyou for the video.