North American Archaeologist

Crescents are flaked stone tools found throughout western North America that are often associated with waterbodies and projectile points diagnostic of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, such as the Western Stemmed Tradition. Archaeologists continue to debate the function of crescents and they remain poorly dated outside of the Channel Islands. Here we report a crescent from recent excavations at Connley Cave 6 in central Oregon and provide a first look at associated stratigraphy, radiocarbon ages, and tools. The crescent's age (ca. 9715-9245 cal BP) and associated projectile points are remarkably like the crescent from Little Steamboat Point-1 Rockshelter in Oregon and suggest that people who used Cascade points during the early Holocene also made crescents. This work helps refine the age of crescents and our understanding of their associated toolkits.

Carroll Cabin is a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP)-eligible property located in southwestern Pennsylvania on land stewarded by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR). Master’s thesis research conducted between 2015 and 2016 provided DCNR with a cultural context of the extant building and associated woodland to assist with their stewardship of the resource. Amongst the five methodologies utilized to research the resource and property were geochemical sampling, archaeological excavation, and dendrochronological study. Used as the first step to geochemically analyze the landscape, soil chemistry results revealed several locations of cultural activity. Excavation of foundations revealed secondary deposition and activity associated with the mid-nineteenth to twentieth-centuries, matching part of the available documentary record. Collected dendrochronology samples indicated that the original hewn-log building was likely constructed between c.1775-1810 and ultimately supported the determination of eligibility due to age and association with the American Frontier.