Cueva Blanca : social change in the archaic of the Valley of Oaxaca

Cueva Blanca lies in a volcanic tuff cliff some 4 km northwest of Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one of a series of Archaic sites excavated by Kent Flannery and Frank Hole as part of a project on the prehistory and human ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca. The oldest stratigraphic level in Cueva Blanca yielded Late Pleistocene fauna, including some species no longer present in southern Mexico. The second oldest level, Zone E, produced Early Archaic material with calibrated dates as old as 11,000–10,000 BC . Zones D and C provided a rich Late Archaic assemblage whose closest ties are with the Abejas phase of Puebla's Tehuacán Valley (fourth millennium BC). Spatial analyses undertaken on the Archaic living floors include (1) the drawing of density contours for tools and animal bones; (2) a search for Archaic tool kits using rank-order and cluster analysis; and (3) an attempt to define Binfordian "drop zones" using an approach drawn from computer vision. Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments Part I. Discovery and Excavation Chapter 1. The Research Questions / Kent V. Flannery Chapter 2. The Discovery of Cueva Blanca / Kent V. Flannery Chapter 3. The Excavation of Cueva Blanca / Kent V. Flannery and Frank Hole Chapter 4. The Radiocarbon Dates from Cueva Blanca / Kent V. Flannery Part II. The Artifacts Chapter 5. The Chipped Stone Tools / Frank Hole Chapter 6. The Archaic Projectile Points / Kent V. Flannery and Frank Hole Chapter 7. The Ground Stone Tools / Kent V. Flannery Chapter 8. Artifacts of Bone and Shell / Kent V. Flannery Part III. Environment and Subsistence Chapter 9. Animal Bones from the Archaic Living Floors / Kent V. Flannery and Jane C. Wheeler Chapter 10. The Microfauna from Cueva Blanca / Kent V. Flannery and Jane C. Wheeler Chapter 11. The Late Archaic Plant Evidence / Kent V. Flannery Part IV. Analysis of the Living Floors Chapter 12. Distributional Variability in Zones E–C of Cueva Blanca: A Local Analysis of Grid-Density Data / Charles S. Spencer and Kent V. Flannery Chapter 13. The Search for Tool Kits at Cueva Blanca: Two Statistical Approaches / Robert G. Reynolds Chapter 14. The Search for "Drop Zones" at Cueva Blanca: An Approach Drawn from Artificial Intelligence / Robert G. Reynolds Part V. Summary and Conclusions Chapter 15. The Place of Cueva Blanca in Oaxaca's Archaic Sequence / Kent V. Flannery and Frank Hole Appendix A. Resumen en Español / Soren Frykholm References "Cueva Blanca is a report on the excavations at the well-known cliff site near Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one of a series of Archaic sites excavated by Kent Flannery and Frank Hole as part of a project on the prehistory and human ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca. The oldest stratigraphic level in Cueva Blanca yielded Late Pleistocene fauna, including some species no longer present in southern Mexico. The second oldest level, Zone E, produced Early Archaic material with calibrated dates as old as 11,000-10,000 BC. Zones D and C provided a rich Late Archaic assemblage whose closest ties are with the Abejas phase of Puebla's Tehuacán Valley (fourth millennium BC)."-- Publisher's website