Core/Biface Ratios, Mobility, Refitting, and Artifact Use-Lives: A Paleoindian Example

Abstract

Low core/biface ratios are often linked to high mobility, and high ratios to more sedentary life styles. The Paleoindian Allen site assemblage exhibits low core/biface ratios among recovered artifacts and higher ratios among refitted sequences. This suggests that cores passed through the site more often than bifaces, but were rarely discarded there. This pattern probably reflects low failure and discard rates in core reduction relative to biface reduction along with brief site use. Core/biface ratios may thus change with increasing sedentism with no change at all in technology simply because sedentary communities produce and exhaust cores primarily at a single location. Variation in core/biface ratios in Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains considered in light of this conclusion suggests significant large scale patterns of variation in general terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene land-use patterns.