The Goshen-Plainview Dilemma

Figure One - A Plainview point on the left was surface recovered in Deaf Smith County, Texas.
A Goshen point on the right was surface recovered in Weld County, Colorado.
John Bradford Branney Collection. 

Can you tell the difference between the two prehistoric projectile points in figure one? Quite frankly, I cannot see much of a difference besides the different materials used by the Paleoindians who made them. That is about it! Technologically and morphologically those two projectile points are identical. 

The projectile point on the left side in figure one was surface rescued from private land in Deaf Smith County, Texas. Its Paleoindian flintknapper used Alibates agatized dolomite from the Panhandle of Texas to make that point. I call that projectile point type: Plainview. 

The 2.3-inch-long projectile point on the right side in figure one was a surface recovery from private land in Weld County, Colorado. Its Paleoindian flintknapper used a grayish orange petrified wood to make that projectile point. I call that projectile point type: Goshen.

Hmm...Same style and technology for those two projectile points...Why do two identical projectile points carry different projectile point type names?

Let me explain the backstory behind those two projectile point types, and then I will explain what is happening to sort out the Goshen-Plainview dilemma.  

Figure Two - CLICK for Book INFORMATION

During the summer of 1941, two young cousins named Val Keene Whitacre and Bill Weaks dug into a soft caliche embankment along Running Water Draw near Plainview, Texas. What the two boys discovered advanced our understanding of human prehistory in North America. Whitacre made the critical discovery, finding a long, stone spear point with one end still embedded in thick, fossilized bone. When the boy picked up the bone and artifact, the bone crumbled apart. 

In 1944, two geologists Glen L. Evans and Grayson E. Meade dug into that same caliche bank and found an incredible discovery — a bone bed filled with skeletons and partial skeletons of approximately 100 extinct bison. The two geologists also found stone projectile points, knives, and scrapers associated with the bone bed.

Texas Memorial Museum and the University of Texas's Bureau of Economic Geology continued excavations at the site from June to October 1945 and in November 1949.

Figure Three - Known geographical distribution for Goshen,
Goshen-Plainview, and Folsom points. 

Even though collectors were finding similar styled projectile points of that distinctive type from Canada to Mexico (figure three), the discovery at Plainview, Texas marked the first time anyone found that projectile point type in direct association with fossilized remains of extinct animals. Archaeologists named that point type Plainview after the nearby town. Archaeological and geologic evidence determined that the Plainview projectile point was younger than another famous projectile point type recently discovered in New Mexico called Folsom. Archaeologists originally dated Plainview projectile points at around 10,000 years old.

Figure Four - Montana's Mill Iron Site Goshen projectile points,
practically indistinguishable from Texas's Plainview projectile points,
but over a thousand years older.   

In mid-August of 1966 at the Hell Gap site in Goshen County, Wyoming, archaeologists were ready to conclude their investigation when they discovered a cultural zone below the Folsom level, indicating that the new cultural zone was older than Folsom. A sterile layer of dirt separated the two cultural zones. At first, the archaeologists declared that the first complete projectile point in that new cultural zone was an atypical Folsom projectile point. The archaeologists then proposed that the new projectile point could be a Clovis projectile point but they quickly dismissed that idea. In his study of that projectile point, principal archaeologist Henry Irwin noted the similarities between the newly discovered projectile point at Hell Gap and the Plainview points previously found in Texas. However, Irwin and his associates encountered a dilemma in naming the newly discovered projectile point after the Plainview points in Texas. 

What was the dilemma?   

Plainview points in Texas were found above Folsom points in the geologic column at the Plainview site. Using the geological law of superposition meant Plainview projectile points were younger than Folsom projectile points. However, at the Hell Gap site in Wyoming, that new Plainview lookalike projectile point was discovered below Folsom projectile points making the Plainview lookalike projectile point older than Folsom projectile points. 

In a nutshell, the geological law of superposition states that in any sequence of sedimentary strata not overturned, the youngest stratum is at the top and the oldest stratum is at the base, in other words, each bed is younger than the one beneath it.      

The dilemma was that the projectile points from the Plainview and Hell Gap Sites were morphologically and technologically the same type, but the Plainview projectile points in Texas were younger than Folsom projectile points while at the Hell Gap Site, the Plainview lookalike point was older than Folsom. Therefore, based on that "age discrepancy", Henry Irwin reluctantly proposed a new projectile point type called Goshen, after the county where the Hell Gap site was located.  

Investigators confirmed the time gap between Goshen on the northern High Plains and Plainview along the Panhandle of Texas in the 1980s at the Mill Iron Site in Montana (Figure Four). George Frison (1996) realized there was not much difference between the points they discovered at Mill Iron and the Plainview points in Texas, except of course their ages. He addressed the situation by integrating the two projectile point types into one projectile point technology called Goshen-Plainview.  

How is that discrepancy in age explained? My gut feeling is that Goshen-Plainview technology overlapped with Folsom technology both temporally and geographically. The data at Hell Gap and the Plainview sites reflected two separate incidents for the presence of Goshen-Plainview, one incident in which it was older than the  Folsom occupation (Hell Gap) and one incident in which it was younger than the Folsom occupation (Plainview), but in both incidents, the occupants used Goshen-Plainview technology.  



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Postscript 

Since I originally wrote that article many years ago, much work has occurred to unravel the age discrepancies between Goshen and Plainview. Waters and Stafford (2014) redated the Goshen strata at the Mill Iron site in Montana and compared it to strata at other high plains Goshen sites such as Jim Pitts and Upper Twin Mountain. They found that Mill Iron showed the oldest age for Goshen while Jim Pitts showed the youngest age. They concluded from the data that Goshen's age range was approximately 12,500 cal BP to 11,800 cal BP. Based on that evidence, Waters and Stafford suggested that Goshen technology emerged sometime after the introduction of Folsom technology and continued into post-Folsom times. That was a big revelation at the time since most people believed that Goshen was older than Folsom based on the stratigraphic evidence from the Hell Gap site and the original dating at the Mill Iron sites.    

Dating the original Plainview site in Texas was always problematic. Buchanan, Collard, and O'Brien (2017) reported that archaeologists sampled four other Plainview sites in Texas: Bonfire Shelter, Lubbock Lake, Lake Theo, and Williamson-Plainview. The archaeologists came up with a minimum age range of between 12,100 cal BP and 11,300 cal BP for Plainview. Based on that data, it appeared that Goshen technology was older to the north, and spread to the south where it became what we call Plainview. Based on those two studies, it seemed that Goshen and Plainview overlapped in the north and south for approximately three hundred years and that Plainview carried on in the south after Goshen disappeared in the north.       

Goshen and Plainview were now in similar time horizons with the technology spreading geographically from north to south. Since investigators recognized the Plainview projectile point type first, perhaps we should abandon the Goshen projectile point type and roll those projectile points and Goshen sites under the Plainview umbrella. 

2017      Buchanan, Briggs; Collard, Mark; and O'Brien, Michael J., 

              "Geometric Morphometric Analyses Support Incorporating the Goshen Point 

             Type into Plainview" in Plainview, edited by Holliday, Johnson, and Knudson.                       History Faculty Publications. 27. 

1996      Frison, George C. 

              The Mill Iron Site. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque.           

2014    Waters, Michael R., and Thomas W. Stafford Jr. 

            "Redating the Mill Iron Site in Montana: A Reexamination of Goshen Complex                    Chronology" in American Antiquity 79 (3), pages 541-548. 

The historical fiction novels written by John Bradford Branney are known for their impeccable research and biting realism. In his latest blockbuster novel Beyond the Campfire, Branney catapults his readers back into Prehistoric America where they reunite with some familiar faces from Branney’s best-selling prehistoric adventure series the Shadows on the Trail Pentalogy.

John Bradford Branney holds a geology degree from the University of Wyoming and an MBA from the University of Colorado. John lives in the Colorado mountains with his wife, Theresa. Beyond the Campfire is the eleventh published book by Branney.