Abstract

Excavation of in situ Scottsbluff (9,340±120 14C years B.P.) occupational deposits at the MacHaffie site (24JF4) in 1951 by Richard G. Forbis, on the western flank of the Elkhorn Mountains in west-central Montana, resulted also in the discovery and recovery of an underlying Folsom component (estimated average 10,425 14C years B.P.). Recent extensions of those investigations nearly 50 years later by the Museum of the Rockies have yielded nondiagnostic chert artifacts and highly fragmentary utilized faunal remains from considerable depth below the Folsom stratum. Excavations at the stratified Indian Creek Paleoindian site (24BW626) 30 km southeast of MacHaffie, also in the Elkhorn Mountain Range on the eastern flank, in 1982-1986 also documented a Folsom (10,410±60 14C years B.P.) component, this time with an underlying Clovis (10,980±150 14C years B.P.) occupation. These Paleoindian cultural sequences are contained within floodplain alluvium in moderate gradient depositional settings, both of which had been subject to Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene fluvial processes. Contextual integrity of Paleoindian occupational debris thusly incorporated, and the likelihood that remains of this antiquity will be preserved and discovered, are among the technical issues discussed.