San Patrice

[TJdave]

Why is San Patrice all local lithic? From the age one would expect trade in far better stone from just a little west, yet its all lesser quality local stuff thats fairly scarce and not great to work with.

[gregszybala]

Welcome TJ.
Could you expand on your question. Doing a little looking the San Patrice is found from the panhandle of Florida and Alabama across West to New Mexico. Also see a lot of examples of different cherts.
There are some folks in your area, eventually they may stop by and offer some help to your question.

[TJdave]

Thanks!
Yes I should have been a lot more specific. Im my area, east Texas they are almost always made from either cobbles/Jasper of petrified wood. Im no great knapper by any means but I can knock one out of Georgetown in a couple minutes. Ive tried a couple out of petrified wood (from my deer lease) and they lead to frustration and stuff to sweep up on the garage floor. Folsom was going on about the same time just a days walk or so away (IMHO anyway). Clovis around here used non local stuff, why not San Patrice?

[clovisoid]

I love San Patrice points, they are a neat, localized tradition. Some of the pet wood and local cobbles make for great looking relics. I've never found a San Patrice, but I've bought a lot of them over the years because they are such cool points.

Short Answer: Something happened in the late paleo & early archaic time periods where some people evidently became a lot more local. Some of it was climate change, but a portion of it was something else (conflict, crowding, development of territories?)

Longer Answer: In parts of Texas and Louisiana you have San Patrice points that are made almost exclusively of local materials, when as you point out, other points from a similar time period were made from better quality imported materials. The timing also lines up with the Younger Dryas, which was a return to ice age like conditions that probably affected rain, grass growth, etc. for a while. Bison probably changed their ranges, forests would have grown into the plains, deserts expanded in other areas. San Patrice camps will often produce a lot of points and tools which indicates a pretty decent population for a long period of time. It might not have been less food that kept them from seeking out better material, it might have just been a stable source of food that didn't force them to roam around like their earlier paleo ancestors.

I am much more familiar with my home state than Texas, but there are lots of similar examples around the states that happened for 2000 years or so. In Southern Indiana you see some Kirk Corner Notch points from rock shelters that are made from hyper local materials when much better stuff was literally 20 miles away across a minor river. You also almost no deer remains in the rock shelters, they ate a lot of small animals, turtles, and likely roots and veggies that they could collect. Which indicates people weren't straying too far from home. (That may not be true for Kirk points from the South.) But you see Dovetails from roughly the same time found in fields (not shelters) made from imported & high quality local material. Were the same people using Kirks at home for part of the year, and then using "exotic" points during the summer months when they came down from the foothills? Were they two separate populations?

The same thing happened with some Dalton groups in some areas, but not others. It happened with Bolen makers in Florida. You see it in Montana where Knife River Flint from the Dakotas was a really common choice for materials, and then it just stops for a while while groups switched to more local rock or in many cases rock from the West vs rock from East, and then eventually KRF picks back up again.

[TJdave]

Thank you, thats a good perspective. We don't really see thin bifaces like I would expect if they needed to process bison either. The acid soil locally doesn't do well for the faunal record, but I bet its the same, great squirrel hunters with hickory nuts, acorns, and greenbriar. Would also explain why their decedents much later were so late in adopting agriculture