Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

Paleoarchaic studies in western North America comprise often competing frameworks of subsistence, technology, work organization, and gender. An alternative approach recognizes the vast energetic and bio-geographic potential of geophytes, particularly cattail (Typha latifolia), as well as the most important tool used in their procurement, the digging stick. The manufacture and maintenance of digging sticks requires flaked stone implements, primarily simple edge-modified flake tools that are ubiquitous in most early-dating assemblages. Together, this approach allows us to re-imagine the foundations of Paleoarchaic subsistence-settlement; how flaked stone technologies were organized with regard to the work efforts of both men and women; and how these groups may have expanded into unfamiliar environments.