Old Lake and River Sites
In 1934 and 1935 Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Campbell found traces of man along the beaches of vanished lakes in the southern California desert. At first Antevs believed that the lakes formed when the glaciers were melting away 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, but now he dates the artifacts and camp sites as less than 9,000 years old. At Lake Mohave, in the Campbells’ first year of work, they found only stone tools—Mohave and Silver Lake points—but in the Pinto Basin they came upon the bones of extinct mammals as well as artifacts.[33] Malcolm J. Rogers challenges the dating of Mohave and Pinto as “largely a matter of opinion,” and believes that “even approximate dates ... cannot be set.” In his own opinion, Pinto points—mixed with Gypsum in the same area—range only from 1,800 to 2,800 years ago. The Lake Mohave industry cannot begin, he maintains, earlier than 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.[34] In 1946, Robert F. Heizer and Edwin M. Lemert and later A. E. Treganza discovered in Topanga Canyon, north of Los Angeles, points and crude scrapers and choppers very like those at Lake Mohave and Gypsum Cave and also milling stones.[35] Lake Mohave artifacts have been found in northwestern Canada.[36]
A number of sites in the West and Southwest are particularly notable for their age or for the character of their artifacts, or for both. Some push the record of man in America back beyond Folsom, possibly far, far beyond; and some bring into the picture a type of artifact—the milling stone—which does not seem to have appeared in Europe until later. The publications upon these sites from 1935 to 1941 aroused much controversy even while broadening and deepening our knowledge of early man.
Three early points from the borders of extinct lakes in the desert area of southern California. Points like the Pinto have been found in Chile. (The Pinto, after Wormington, 1944; the other two, after Campbell, 1937.)
Confusion, as well as controversy, distinguishes the area which might prove the most significant of the four if more extended work were done there by geologists as well as archaeologists. This area is in the neighborhood of Abilene, Texas, and includes the banks of the Elm Creek branch of the Brazos River. Cyrus N. Ray, a local physician, has studied the Abilene sites assiduously for twenty years. In 1931 Gila Pueblo—Harold S. Gladwin’s research institution—sent E. B. Sayles to work there. Later Gila arranged to have Antevs, Howard, and M. M. Leighton, Chief of the Illinois State Geological Survey, study the finds and the sites. It is unfortunate that the men who worked in this area have not agreed on a consistent set of names for the various cultures and geological formations. As H. M. Wormington has observed, “the only way to approach publications dealing with the archaeology of this region is with a large bottle of aspirin in either hand.”
An Abilene point. (After Wormington, 1944.)
The artifacts occurred in two strata. The upper contained points of types now called Plainview and Milnesand and a long, narrow point that has been dubbed Abilene, though not accepted as a distinct type by Texas archaeologists. Leighton placed these tools from what he called the Elm Creek Silts in the latter portion of our last Glacial period.[37] To reach Abilene at this time, early man may have passed through the gap that is thought to have appeared in the ice sheet east of the Rockies 40,000 years ago, or else when the Wisconsin ice of the last glaciers was in retreat 20,000 years later (see illustrations, pages [26] and [27]).
Still greater age is claimed for certain other objects of the Abilene area. Below the Elm Creek Silts lie the Durst Silts, which were laid down, Leighton thinks, prior to the last glaciation.[38] In connection with these silts Sayles found what may be very crude artifacts.[39] They are the “eoliths” that, wherever found in the Old World, are accepted or attacked as problematical evidences of man’s first attempts at roughly chipped artifacts. If these are indeed the work of man, and if Leighton is right, the men who made them must have come to Texas during the Sangamon Interglacial period preceding the last, or Wisconsin, glaciation—a matter of perhaps 70,000 years ago.
Some authorities attack Leighton’s dating and therefore Sayles’s eoliths. The reported discovery later of Abilene and other points in the Durst Silts suggested to Kirk Bryan that the silts would have to be moved up in time.[40] He might have argued that the artifacts should be moved back, which would have been in line with his championing of very early man elsewhere. Agreeing with Bryan and C. C. Albritton, Frank C. Hibben redated the Durst Silts by connecting them with a late glacier in the Rocky Mountains rather than with the Wisconsin ice field of the north.[41] Leighton, on the other hand, maintained—and he has had some good support—that the soil at various depths had been radically changed by chemical action which would take tens of thousands of years. This “soil profile” theory as a test of geological age is gaining in importance.[42]