uniface
Silver Member
Those of us who check out Pete Bostrum's Lithic Casting Lab offerings every month and read Tony Baker's blog entries on Clovis will recognize the name Carl Yahnig. He's a (retired) school teacher in Hopkinsville, Kentucky who discovered, recognized and meticulously collected Paleoindian artifacts from a cluster of five sites that have since come to be called the Little River Complex. In terms of the sheer numbers and importance of the artifacts it's produced, a good way to visualize it would be to think of it as the Eastern analogue of the Gault site in Texas, the difference being that Gault is being systematically excavated, while the LRC remains a surface-collected assemblage, as Shoop was/is.
Being archaeologically oriented, Carl understood from the first that every piece of worked chert that turned up was important in the big picture of what the Clovis people were doing there, collecting all of it (sometimes using five gallon buckets) and recording the find locations involved. After coming up on fifty years of this, the Little River Clovis Complex material is the most complete and extensive record anywhere of not only what the Clovis culture made, but of how they made it, from nodules on up through recycled artifacts.
Carl's recently published a 241 page book, which I got last week and have hardly put down since, entitled My One Hundred and One Favorite Artifacts. If your mental horizon stops at just collecting arrowheads, it probably won't do much for you. But if you're interested in how the Paleoindians went about turning nodules of chert into finished points and tools, or think it might be a good thing to learn to recognize a Clovis site by the characteristic knapping signatures they left behind on unfinished and abandoned in-progress items (for that matter, to learn what some of the worked pieces are), there's no other book like this.
There are a few points and beautiful tools featured in it, along with an amazing platter biface, a conical blade core, and similar "trophy items." But the great bulk of it (full page color pictures with descriptions and measurements) is comprised of cores, blades and preforms in various stages of manufacture, along with outrepasse flakes, overshot basal thinning removals, and other items of this nature -- the kinds of artifacts you'll be finding on a long-term Paleo habitation site (base camp) if you're fortunate enough to find one.
I rate it five stars out of a possible five, both for its intrinsic interest and for being a one-of-a-kind resource.
It's available for $30 (post paid) from the author :
Carl Yahnig
5050 Striped Bridge Road
Hopkinsville, Kentucky
42240
Being archaeologically oriented, Carl understood from the first that every piece of worked chert that turned up was important in the big picture of what the Clovis people were doing there, collecting all of it (sometimes using five gallon buckets) and recording the find locations involved. After coming up on fifty years of this, the Little River Clovis Complex material is the most complete and extensive record anywhere of not only what the Clovis culture made, but of how they made it, from nodules on up through recycled artifacts.
Carl's recently published a 241 page book, which I got last week and have hardly put down since, entitled My One Hundred and One Favorite Artifacts. If your mental horizon stops at just collecting arrowheads, it probably won't do much for you. But if you're interested in how the Paleoindians went about turning nodules of chert into finished points and tools, or think it might be a good thing to learn to recognize a Clovis site by the characteristic knapping signatures they left behind on unfinished and abandoned in-progress items (for that matter, to learn what some of the worked pieces are), there's no other book like this.
There are a few points and beautiful tools featured in it, along with an amazing platter biface, a conical blade core, and similar "trophy items." But the great bulk of it (full page color pictures with descriptions and measurements) is comprised of cores, blades and preforms in various stages of manufacture, along with outrepasse flakes, overshot basal thinning removals, and other items of this nature -- the kinds of artifacts you'll be finding on a long-term Paleo habitation site (base camp) if you're fortunate enough to find one.
I rate it five stars out of a possible five, both for its intrinsic interest and for being a one-of-a-kind resource.
It's available for $30 (post paid) from the author :
Carl Yahnig
5050 Striped Bridge Road
Hopkinsville, Kentucky
42240
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