A Lithic Analysis of School Land I (34DL64) A Northern Caddo Village in the Foothills of the Ozarks

Abstract

School Land I (34DL64) is a Harlan Phase (A.D. 1050-1250) Caddo village site set in the Arkansas River basin at the confluence of the Grand and Elk Rivers in Delaware County, Oklahoma. This site was originally excavated by the Works Progress Association (WPA) from 1939 to 1940. While the faunal and ceramic assemblages from this site have since been formally analyzed, the lithic assemblage has been unanalyzed until now. These assemblages are important because residential sites in this area are not well understood and there are very few opportunities to recover more data. This is further complicated by the fact that the WPA did not collect debitage and rarely used screens. This means that while there are 1769 lithic specimens studied here, only 36 of them are flakes. The research question of this thesis is: Will analyzing the lithic assemblage of School Land I confirm or deny the various interpretations of the site? Broadly summarized, these interpretations are that the site was only occupied from the Evans Phase (~A.D. 1000-1100) to the Spiro Phase (~A.D. 1350-1450), the most intensive occupation was the Harlan Phase (~A.D. 1100-1250), and this site may have ritual significance along with special-purpose structures. I have employed a biface breakage typology in conjunction with a formal tool typology, material type identification, and spatial analysis to answer this question and hypothesize why material assemblages have differences and similarities. These methods led me to the answer that human activities at the site are much older and more nuanced than previously thought and this pattern could extend to other sites in the region. Time depth at the site goes back at least to the Middle Archaic (5000-2500 B.C.) with the presence of the Calf Creek archaeological culture. Material evidence here indicates that the Harlan Phase occupation was the most intensive. This analysis also supports the ideas of previous researchers that ritual is integrated with domestic life at School Land I. Lithic evidence demonstrates that School Land I was originally used as a hunting area at varying degrees of intensity from the Middle Archaic up until the Harlan Phase when people constructed eight rectangular houses. I also apply a life history approach in conjunction with other archaeological models of human behavior to formalize the interpretation of my results and speak on the differential use-lives within and among morphological categories and formal tools. These interpretations highlight how the Harlan phase inhabitants of School Land I chose this location not only because the site was in an ecologically advantageous position and because it was close to other sites like Reed but also to maintain connections with their ancestors. This assemblage may also be a reliable foundation for investigating more symbolic and social considerations at the site like gendered tool use and tattooing which are relevant to the site's mixing of ritual and domestic spaces.