While it was once believed that agriculture and pottery developed concurrently in prehistoric societies, modern research has concluded that agriculture preceded pottery making, since a sedentary life with greater food production led to both the need and time to create storage containers. Bruce Huckell has been at the forefront of a movement in Arizona archaeology that has greatly modified our understanding of the transition from the Archaic to the agricultural periods in the Southwest. Work done by Huckell and others at Matty Canyon has produced the most detailed account available of a Late...

The Murray Springs Site in the upper San Pedro River Valley of southeast Arizona is one of the most significant Clovis sites ever found. It contained a multiple bison kill, a mammoth kill, and possibly a horse kill in a deeply stratified sedimentary context. Scattered across the buried occupation surface with the bones of late Pleistocene animals were several thousand stone tools and waste flakes from their manufacture and repair. Because of the unique occurrence of an algal black mat that buried the Clovis-age surface immediately after abandonment, the distributional integrity of the...

The Paleoindian Clovis culture is known for distinctive stone and bone tools often associated with mammoth and bison remains, dating back some 13,500 years. While the term Clovis is known to every archaeology student, few books have detailed the specifics of Clovis archaeology. This collection of essays investigates caches of Clovis tools, many of which have only recently come to light. These caches are time capsules that allow archaeologists to examine Clovis tools at earlier stages of manufacture than the broken and discarded artefact's typically recovered from other sites. The studies...