Often characterized by distinctive chipped-stone technology, the Calf Creek cultural horizon made its first appearance in the central and southern plains of North America some six thousand years ago. Distributed over a known area of more than 500,000 square miles, it is one of the largest post-Paleoindian archaeological cultural complexes identified to date. One of the most notable aspects of Calf Creek culture is its distinctive, deeply notched bifaces, many of which show evidence of heat-treating. Recent targeted dating suggests that these unique traits, which required exacting knapping and other techniques for production, arose in a relatively narrow window, sometime around 5,950–5,700 calendar years before the present. Given the wide geographical distribution of Calf Creek artifacts, however, researchers surmise that these technological innovations, once adopted, spread fairly quickly throughout the associated cultural groups. Editors Jon C. Lohse, Marjorie A. Duncan, and Don G. Wyckoff have collected in this comprehensive volume much of what is currently known about the Calf Creek cultural horizon. In a collaboration involving professional and academic archaeologists, landowners, and avocationalists, The Calf Creek Horizon brings together for the first time in a single source fine details of geographic distribution, regional variability, typology, and technological aspects of Calf Creek material culture. This first-ever “big picture” view will inform and direct related research for years to come.

Paleoindians first arrived in Texas more than eleven thousand years ago, although relatively few sites of such early peoples have been discovered. Texas has a substantial post-Paleoindian record, however, and there are more than fifty thousand prehistoric archaeological sites identified across the state. This comprehensive volume explores in detail the varied experience of native peoples who lived on this land in prehistoric times. Chapters on each of the regions offer cutting-edge research, the culmination of years of work by dozens of the most knowledgeable experts. Based on the archaeological record, the discussion of the earliest inhabitants includes a reclassification of all known Paleoindian projectile point types and establishes a chronology for the various occupations. The archaeological data from across the state of Texas also allow authors to trace technological changes over time, the development of intensive fishing and shellfish collecting, funerary customs and the belief systems they represented, long-term changes in settlement mobility and character, landscape use, and the eventual development of agricultural societies. The studies bring the prehistory of Texas Indians all the way up through the Late Prehistoric period (ca. a.d. 700–1600). The extensively illustrated chapters are broadly cultural-historical in nature but stay strongly focused on important current research problems. Taken together, they present careful and exhaustive considerations of the full archaeological (and paleoenvironmental) record of Texas.