Book Plug

[uniface]

This will be of potential interest to those here with an interest in the Early Paleoindian (Clovis proper) era in the middle Southern region of the US. I'm posting to bring it to the attention of those who are. Kindly overlook the references to artifact collecting, as it's posted elsewhere on specifically artifact-collecting boards, and writing it once was a big enough job without re-tailoring it to address the audience here. The bottom line is that, to those able to grasp what is involves, it's a valuable and important reference work that ought to be more widely known than it is likely to be without efforts like this one. Sow enough seeds, and some of them sprout.

Those of us who check out Pete Bostrum's Lithic Casting Lab offerings every month and read Tony Baker's blog entries on Clovis will recognize the name Carl Yahnig. He's a (retired) school teacher in Hopkinsville, Kentucky who discovered, recognized and meticulously collected Paleoindian artifacts from a cluster of five sites that have since come to be called the Little River Complex. In terms of the sheer numbers and importance of the artifacts it's produced, a good way to visualize it would be to think of it as the Eastern analogue of the Gault site in Texas, the difference being that Gault is being systematically excavated, while the LRC remains a surface-collected assemblage, as Shoop was/is.

Being archaeologically oriented, Carl understood from the first that every piece of worked chert that turned up was important in the big picture of what the Clovis people were doing there, collecting all of it (sometimes using five gallon buckets) and recording the find locations involved. After coming up on fifty years of this, the Little River Clovis Complex material is the most complete and extensive record anywhere of not only what the Clovis culture made, but of how they made it, from nodules on up through recycled artifacts.

Carl's recently published a 241 page book, which I got last week and have hardly put down since, entitled My One Hundred and One Favorite Artifacts. If your mental horizon stops at just collecting arrowheads, it probably won't do much for you. But if you're interested in how the Paleoindians went about turning nodules of chert into finished points and tools, or think it might be a good thing to learn to recognize a Clovis site by the characteristic knapping signatures they left behind on unfinished and abandoned in-progress items (for that matter, to learn what some of the worked pieces are), there's no other book like this.

There are a few points and beautiful tools featured in it, along with an amazing platter biface, a conical blade core, and similar "trophy items." But the great bulk of it (full page color pictures with descriptions and measurements) is comprised of cores, blades and preforms in various stages of manufacture, along with outrepasse flakes, overshot basal thinning removals, and other items of this nature -- the kinds of artifacts you'll be finding on a long-term Paleo habitation site (base camp) if you're fortunate enough to find one.

I rate it five stars out of a possible five, both for its intrinsic interest and for being a one-of-a-kind resource.

It's available for $30 (post paid) from the author :

Carl Yahnig
5050 Striped Bridge Road
Hopkinsville, Kentucky
42240

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi uniface -

I'd also like to plug Tony DeRegnaucourt's guide to quarries and their usage through time (artifacts). The quarries absolutely located, type artifacts from each shown in full color plates, giving range of use/exchange.
This book is THE best type book I have seen:

http://www.ohiotraveler.com/chert_type_book.htm

$50, but worth it.

But of course, my own book "Man and Impact in the Americas" remains the best eastern Native American history available.