The East Terrace Site - One Occupation or Two?

The East Terrace Site
One Occupation or Two?

The only clues left by the Paleoindian occupants of East Terrace are four spear or lance points recovered during excavation. Most of these points were found a foot below the surface of the ground under younger and more recently deposited artifacts. Another indication that the points are very old is their similarity to points recovered from sites in the High Plains of Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. Most of these High Plains sites are bison kills, where the bones of extinct species of bison (Bison occidentalis and Bison antiquus) are mingled with the spear points used to kill them. Radiocarbon dates from these sites suggest that the bison kills occurred between 7000 and 10,000 years ago. Because the points found at East Terrace resemble those used approximately 10,000 years ago on the High Plains, archaeologists reason that the tools are from the same general time period.

Spear points are often named for the site where they were first found. This is the case for the Hell Gap, Alberta, and Scottsbluff points found at East Terrace. Hell Gap points were in use approximately 1,000 years before Alberta and Scottsbluff points. Interestingly, the two Hell Gap points at East Terrace lay next to each other in the northwestern portion of the site, while the more recent Scottsbluff and Alberta points were in the southeastern part, 100 feet away. These two clues indicate that an early Paleoindian group inhabited the northwestern part of the site and, perhaps a thousand years later, a second Paleoindian group camped in the southeastern corner of the site. The Paleoindians who stopped at East Terrace for brief visits probably lived in small, highly mobile, extended family groups. This interpretation rests on the small number of waste flakes found. Waste flakes are the chips or flakes broken off a stone when making stone tools. Larger, more sedentary groups would have generated more waste flakes and made a greater variety of stone tools.

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