The Beehive Site is a stratified, Late Archaic quarry-related extraction site in Howard County, Maryland. It served as a short-term lithic resource procurement and processing site, due to the availability of quartz and quartzite cobbles from a nearby stream bed, and also as a temporary campsite. The Beehive Site covers a terrace and floodplain adjacent to an unnamed tributary of Shallow Run. Over 22,000 artifacts were recovered from the Beehive Site. This assemblage consists almost exclusively of lithics, with quartzite as the predominant material. Quartz referred to crystalline varieties in which no individual grains were detectable under low (10x) magnification. Quartzite was characterized as metamorphosed sandstone in which individual grains could be detected under low magnification, but without individual structural identity. The artifact assemblage is dominated by lithic debris related to core preparation and reduction from local cobbles, the production and use of flake tools, and biface production from large flakes, thin cobbles, and cores. It appears that Native Americans were utilizing quartz and quartzite cobbles in the nearby stream to produce expedient stone tools. Therefore, lithic artifacts recovered from the Beehive Site include unmodified flakes and shatter, blade-like flakes, core and core fragments, and bifaces. The majority of the bifaces recovered from the Beehive Site were discarded on the floodplain during the early stages of tool production. Lithic procurement was not the only type of activity that occurred at the Beehive Site. A limited number of non-reduction activities were inferred from the types of artifacts recovered. The presence of hammerstones, finished bifaces, Bare Island and Piscataway projectile points, flake tools, fire-cracked rocks, an anvil/nutting stone, an abrader, and an unidentified groundstone tool indicate that a short-term camp was also present. Evidence of wood/bone-working and hide and/or meat processing was found on flaked tools from edge damage/wear, edge angles, and protein residue analysis. Two utilized flakes tested positive for animal protein residue, one being associated with rabbit blood. Unfortunately, poor preservation of faunal materials and macrobotanical remains limited the amount of environmental data available about the Beehive Site.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 04:31:49 +0000
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