Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

The C.W. Harris site, type site for the early Holocene San Dieguito complex in San Diego County, has a long history of investigation, much of it driven by culture-historical and typological questions. We deviate from this pattern by describing the Warren and True (1961) chipped stone assemblage and documenting the San Dieguito inhabitantsí organization of lithic technology. Technological and high-power usewear analyses reveal that the biface and flake tool dominated assemblage consists almost entirely of manufacturing rejects and/or unused specimens. This and other evidence indicates that C.W. Harris functioned primarily as a non-residential, special-purpose workshop for biface (mostly Type 1 bifaces) and flake tool (mainly scrapers) manufacturing, with a possible secondary campsite function. Bifaces and scrapers are common in toolkits used to kill and process game, and imply that as a lithic workshop C.W. Harris was a feeder for new tools critical to sustaining a mobile lifeway.