Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Applied Archaeology

Department

Anthropology

First Reader/Committee Chair

Des Lauriers

Abstract

My thesis is that archaeological evidence from the Havasu Landing Site (CA-SBR-1456) in San Bernardino County, California, supports the Coastal Migration Theory (CMT) proposed by Davis and Madsen (2020). The CMT suggests that humans followed the Pacific coastline to America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), approximately 24,000 years ago (Erlandson 2024). I examined the site’s minimally modified cobbles, described as “just broken rocks,” confirming them to meet the definition of “creative minimization tools,” a criterion of the CMT. I found clustering of the minimization and other atypical stone tools with siliceous blade cores representing a 30,000-year-old East Asian technology likely spreading to North America with coastal human migration, predating the 13,390-year-old Clovis points. The site’s tool assemblage resembles that of the Malpais Industry (Rogers 1939), which some archaeologists consider to signify the oldest human occupation in southern California. Related findings suggest that Native American oral history, mtDNA, linguistics, and rock art support the CMT. A spatial autocorrelation analysis reveals a strong non-random linear distribution of artifact hotspots along what geological data has shown to be a possible shoreline of a last glacial lake on the Lower Colorado River system. Human occupation of the conceptual lakefront suggests a site age from the LGM era, potentially as old as the 23,000-year-old Tularosa Basin footprints (Pigati et al., 2023). Future radiocarbon dating of potential lake shoreline biological materials could theoretically confirm site age.

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