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Borax Lake Site: Revised (Yet Again)

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Borax Lake Site: Revised (Yet Again) 10 Volume 22 ■ Number 2 Early methodology produced checkered results 9 Borax Lake Site: In his monograph (Suggested Readings, “An Ancient Site at 1 Borax Lake, California”), Harrington writes that the most frus- trating aspect of the Borax Lake site excavation was the dis- Revised (Yet Again) rupted condition of the cultural strata, mainly in Layer 1, on 10 by Mark R. Barnes, account of the roots of walnut trees planted on top of the site at 2 Senior Archaeologist, NPS the beginning of the 20th century and the subsequent distur- bance caused by rodents attracted by the trees. A museum archaeologist, digging in a walnut grove in northern Another problem was that Harrington’s test holes and California in the 1930s, was exploring strata laid down in trenches were inadequate to produce conclusive stratigraphic extinct Borax Lake. Unlike other pluvial lakes in the Great Basin sequencing over the entire 26-acre Borax Lake site. Geo- and coastal California, however, Borax Lake didn’t dry up at the archaeologist C. Vance Haynes found that Harrington, in order end of the Pleistocene. Instead, its stable lakeshore environment 3 to compensate for the lack of more extensive horizontal inves- was home to successive cultures well into the Holocene. The tigation and better stratigraphic information, “plotted the fre- first occupation found by this dogged scientist ultimately quency of projectile point types with depth and thereby 11 proved to be far older than the first supposed human presence concluded that the fluted points were the earliest.” Harrington west of the Sierra Nevadas. Not only did Borax Lake archaeol- concluded that small bands of Paleo-Indian and early-Archaic ogy refute the classic model of the routes used by the First peoples first occupied the site, making fluted points and later Americans to colonize North America, it produced the first wide-stemmed points while encamped beside Borax Lake. The evidence of a culture contemporary with Clovis but unique to the greater number of stemmed points and their broader distribu- Far West, the Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition. tion over the site suggested to Harrington that the early- In September 2006 the Secretary of the Interior designated Archaic period “represents the major part of the occupation of the Borax Lake site (CA-LAK-36) a National Historic Land- the site and includes the largest part of the artifact collection.” 4 mark. It was recognition long overdue for this paradigm-shat- Harrington excavated the Borax Lake site before the se- tering site, located two hours’ drive north of San Francisco, quencing of prehistoric cultures of the Far West was well under- because for decades professional archaeologists questioned the stood and established. Lacking dating techniques other than legitimacy of Borax Lake as a Paleo-Indian site. relative geological dating, he erroneously concluded that “the entire artifact-bearing deposit was laid down within perhaps a 12 5 Layer-cake stratigraphy in a walnut orchard few centuries.” Thus his research at the Borax Lake site is sadly The Borax Lake site is located near Clear Lake within an imperfect: He correctly interpreted cultural occupations as dat- abandoned walnut orchard on a late-Pleistocene alluvial fan ing from the Paleo-Indian Period, but he incorrectly lumped along the eastern shore of Borax Lake. The site is around 1,400 early- and middle- Archaic occupations with the Paleo-Indian. ft above sea level in the Sonoran woodland-grass vegetation From the time Harrington’s fieldwork and analysis were zone, a mosaic of grasslands, oaks, gray pines, and chaparral published in 1948, most California archaeologists rejected his typical of the Coast Ranges of northern California. The Borax 6 findings. Their reaction, note Drs. Haynes and Clement Lake Obsidian Dome, a ridge near the site and less than 100 ft Meighan of the University of California–Berkeley, launched above the lake, contains extensive obsidian deposits that are “an immediate and continuing controversy over the age of the assumed to have been the source of toolstone for prehistoric site, the nature of the artifacts, and the interpretation to be inhabitants. drawn from the Borax Lake collection,” with particular focus 13 During the Paleo-Indian and early-Archaic periods (12,000 1 on whether it contained a Paleo-Indian component. To many to 8000 RCYBP ) of the primary occupation of the Borax Lake archaeologists, the artifacts in Harrington’s Borax Lake collec- site, the climate was cooler than present. It’s likely that conifer- tion “did not appear to belong together and did not fit the 7 ous forests covered much of the northern coast ranges at the emerging pattern of similarities between one early man site end of the Pleistocene. After about 7000 RCYBP, the climate and another.” became much warmer and drier, developing into the present- day environment. New techniques torpedo an outdated paradigm 14 In early 1938, amateur archaeologist Chester Post showed Harrington’s ideas of Paleo-Indian occupation in northern Cali- fluted projectile points found along the shores of Borax Lake to fornia also ran counter to the then prevailing theory of the Mark R. Harrington of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. earliest occupation of North America. During the 1950s and Dr. Harrington saw they resembled fluted points found at the 1960s, archaeologists theorized that the Americas were first 8 eponymous Clovis site in New Mexico and other Pleistocene settled along a path through Alaska and down into the Great kill sites in the southwestern U.S., and immediately the South- Basin and Plains regions of North America; west of the Sierra west Museum launched four seasons of investigations at the Nevada Mountains was a marginal region that presumably 15 Borax Lake site (1938–1946). Under Harrington’s direction wasn’t settled until later, perhaps thousands of years after they dug 10 trenches and 6 test holes. man’s original entry into the New World. Accordingly, Meighan placed the Borax Lake site in the Middle Central 1 Even though radiocarbon dating is a technique that wasn’t available to 56 early researchers at the Borax Lake site, all dates in this article are given in California period, roughly 7000 to 3000 RCYBP, an interpreta- radiocarbon years before present for consistency. tion that excluded the Paleo-Indian component. April ■ 2007 11 48 Layers at Borax Lake 49 Harrington’s interpretation of Borax Lake site deposits identified six geological layers. 1 ■ Layer 6, the lowest layer, a “gray homogeneous clay,” according to Harrington “was an original lake-bottom 50 deposit dating from some stage of the Pleistocene” a b before that which produced the succeeding layers, 2 when the waters of Borax Lake covered the vicinity of the site. 3 ■ Layer 5, next deposited, consisted of sand and gravels 4 “laid down as beach deposits after the lake had with- drawn somewhat, although at the time, the climate was 5 51 rainy enough to maintain the lake at a point consider- ably higher than it reaches today, or the beach would 6 not have formed at this level.” 52 ■ Layer 4 was a silt layer deposited on Layer 5 when the oxidized.” This erosion apparently cut through Layer 2 lake’s water level rose again. Harrington didn’t find and, in some areas, down into Layer 3. evidence of human occupation in Layers 6 to 4. ■ Layer 1 was deposited, Harrington determined, during ■ Layer 3, a mixed clay and gravel alluvium washed 53 an unusually rainy period “as part of an alluvial fan . down from the surrounding mountains during the plu- consisting of unsorted angular pebbles, gravel, sand, vial, or wetter, late Pleistocene covered much of Layer 4. and clay.” He subdivided this layer into Layer 1a and ■ Layer 2, an alluvium composed of iron-rich red grav- 1b. Generally of a yellowish color, it also contained 55 elly clay deposited on Layer 3, formed the occupation dark deposits “due to mixture, during its deposition, surface, Harrington notes, “when the first human visi- with charcoal and other refuse of human origin.” 54 tors arrived at Borax Lake.” He inferred that during this Harrington believed that Layer 1 was laid down around initial occupation, “long exposure had caused consider- 3000 RCYBP during the Little Pluvial period, burying the able erosion, and the iron in the soil had become earlier cultural deposits. In 1964, Haynes and Charles Rozaire, a participant in the ported Harrington’s original view that humans occupied the original Borax Lake excavations, cut 16 backhoe trenches on Borax Lake site during the Paleo-Indian Period. Harrington’s three transects across the walnut orchard in order to resolve faulty conclusions about the site’s age resulted from his the strata and dating problems encountered by Harrington. misidentifying early- and middle-Archaic projectile points as Haynes, analyzing the data with Meighan, concluded that geo- Paleo-Indian. It was one error in otherwise creditable scholar- logical evidence actually supported Harrington’s contention ship that nevertheless cast suspicion over the entire collection. that the cultural material he recovered was located within and Meighan and Haynes further concluded that Paleo-Indian 16 on a late-Pleistocene alluvial fan. Together they identified two fluted points could be paired with chipped-stone crescent arti- artifact-bearing levels: a lower level, described as a grayish facts. (More about crescents below.) This pairing of dissimilar brown silt and gravel (Harrington’s Layer 2), and an upper diagnostic lithic artifacts is singular to the Paleo-Indian cul- level composed of a yellowish brown clay and gravel tures of the Far West. A radical concept at the time, it was later 18 (Harrington’s Layer 1). The pair presumed that the artifacts supported by similar finds at other extinct pluvial lakeshore found below these two levels in a dark brown gravel sites in southern California and Nevada, such as Tulare and (Harrington’s Layer 3) had been displaced from the upper two Lake Mohave, California, and Long Valley Lake, Nevada.
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