Gault (archaeological site)

The Gault archaeological site is an extensive, multicomponent site located in central Texas, United States, about 40 miles north of Austin. It bears evidence of almost continuous human occupation, starting at least 16,000 years ago—making it one of the few but growing number of archaeological sites in the Americas at which compelling evidence has been found for human occupation dating to before the appearance of the Clovis culture.

Probably the major issue troubling American archaeology over the last several decades has been establishing when the first humans arrived in the western hemisphere. For nearly half a century the very large majority of working archaeologists adhered to the notion that people making and using the very distinctive Clovis "point" and its associated lithic technology were the first to arrive about 13,500 calendar years ago and to have spread quickly throughout the Americas. However, there was always a small archaeological minority who contended that the first Americans (in the broadest, two-continent, sense) had been here long before Clovis times on both the east and west margins of both continents. In the last several decades, with the location, investigation, and reporting of a growing number of sites with reliable dating, more and more American archaeologists now believe the western hemisphere was occupied at least several thousand years prior to the appearance of diagnostic Clovis materials.

Most of these sites are widely spaced geographically and do not contain an extensive array of associated lithic materials that would show a diagnostic pattern of tool production and use. An attempt to define the characteristics of these older technologies can best be accomplished by investigating sites which are both well-stratified, containing both the older and Clovis materials—in order to compare technologies in use in the same location under similar conditions—and show evidence of extended periods of occupation where a wide range of activities took place employing the whole array of lithic tools.

The Gault site contains strata which date to prior to the appearance of Clovis (more than 13,500 years B.P.) and to Clovis (13,500 to 13,000 years B.P.), as well as the entire subsequent occupational sequence of the Central Texas region, from late Paleoindian (13,000 to 9,000 years ago) to Archaic (9,000 to 1200 years B.P.), and finally to Late Prehistoric (1200 to 500 years B.P.). A reason for this intensive and almost continuous occupation appears to be the site's location adjacent to two different but resource-rich ecosystems (the uplands of the Edwards Plateau and the lower Blackland Prairie) where water from Buttermilk Creek was available even in drought years, and where a wide variety of local food resources was concentrated. Another is that Gault was also a quarry site, where good quality Edwards chert toolstone (the Edwards Plateau is geologically one of the largest chert bearing formations in North America) was readily available, weathering out of the banks of both modern and ancient watercourses; chert from the Edwards Plateau has been identified as being used for toolmaking as far away as the Lindenmeier site in Colorado.

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