Douglas Bamforth and his colleagues demonstrate in this edited volume the valuable role in modern archaeology for thoughtful reinvestigation of previously studied site locations and archaeological collections. Containing 14 chapters by 11 contributors, The Allen Site includes comprehensive paleoenvironmental research and detailed reanalysis of cultural materials recovered from renowned excavations conducted in the Medicine Creek Basin between 1947 and 1949, deposits that hold a series of human occupations ranging from 10,550 to 8,000 radiocarbon years in age. These new studies provide valuable improvements to our understanding of environmental change and early human adaptations during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene on the Central Great Plains. The book also offers essential perspectives on the original paleontological and archaeological research in this region with a primary focus on the Allen Site (although updated geomorphic and paleoenvironmental information is presented for the nearby sites of Red Smoke, Lime Creek, and Stafford)

Amick, Daniel S.

English

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences Great Plains Studies, Center for 2009 Book Review: The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth Daniel S. Amick Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsresearch  Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Amick, Daniel S., "Book Review: The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth" (2009). Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences. 1000. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsresearch/1000 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Great	Plains	Research	Vol.	19	No.	1,	2009128©	2009	Center	for	Great	Plains	Studies,	University	of	Nebraska–Lincolndecentralized governance will necessarily inhibit cooperation to protect watersheds. Even with comprehensive governing institutions, there are bound to be different interests with com-peting goals that need to be coordinated. The more fragmented polycentric governance may be better at representing interests and no worse at facilitating cooperation. There is no one-size-fits-all solution; rather, different governance structures should and do emerge. The analysis presented in each chapter is focused on con-cepts that are examined and applied in a case study to explain the existing system of governance. Although the concepts are not integrated into a framework, the authors’ careful use of concepts provides insights into watershed decision making. Just as concepts are not integrated into a grand framework, there is no prescription for the best type of governance. This may disappoint those seeking the answer to watershed governance, but the book provides realistic analyses of the complex manage-ment problems of watersheds. Perhaps in the future, additional research will more definitely link governance structures to types of watershed problems, different locales, and desired environmental outcomes. For the present, however, Schlager and Blomquist have provided a thoughtful examination of wa-tershed governance that can be read and appreciated by scholars across multiple disciplines. sandra K. Davis, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University.The Great sand Hills: a Prairie oasis. Text by Rebecca L. Grambo. Photographs by Branimir Gjetvaj. Regina, SK: Nature Saskatchewan, 2007. 124 pp. Photographs, appendices, bibliog-raphy, index. C$24.95 paper. The Great Sand Hills region of southwestern Saskatchewan is among the largest and, unfortunately, last intact native prairie ecosystems in the Great Plains. The Great Sand Hills: A Prairie Oasis is thus a fitting title. Filled with spectacular photography alongside narrative text telling the story of the prairie’s past, present, and future, this 124-page book was a finalist for the 2007 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award as well as in the nonfiction and scholarly writing categories. The first of the volume’s three sections provides a condensed physical and human history of the Great Plains, describing the glacial events leading up to the formation and then subsequent natural and cultural evolution of the Great Sand Hills land-scape. Rebecca Grambo covers a lot of ground, eloquently tell-ing the region’s history from its first cultural inhabitants and the rise and fall of the Plains bison, to the emergence of a ranching lifestyle and the cultivation of the surrounding mixed-prairie landscape. The text is interspersed with stories and narratives of homesteaders extracted from personal memoirs.  In part two Grambo paints a picture of the current landscape of the Great Sand Hills, describing the region’s physical geog-raphy and concentrating largely on the ecology and sensitivity of the landscape, but also emphasizing a cultural connectivity forged by a history of local ranching activity.  The third section, pointing toward the future, describes the development of several land use planning initiatives, includ-ing the most recent Great Sand Hills Regional Environmental Study—a response to emerging concerns over the cumulative effects of ranching activity, a growing natural gas industry with more than 1,500 wells in the less than 2,000 square kilometer area of active dunes and mixed-grass prairie, and the resulting network of roads and trails that now fragment parts of the land-scape.  Grambo concludes with a discussion centered on “choosing our path,” arguing that “the choice about further development seems obvious” and that “there should be no further gas explo-ration and development” in the Great Sand Hills. Unfortunately, the choice is not this simple. In many areas of the Great Sand Hills leases for gas development have already been sold; future development in them is inevitable. That said, much of this prairie oasis remains intact. In 2007, an independent scientific committee presented the government of Saskatchewan with three land use options for the future of the Great Sand Hills, each representing more or less ambitious development futures, the resulting implications for biodiversity, and a recommenda-tion for a preferred option focused on maintaining the ecologi-cal integrity of the landscape. Unfortunately, at the time of this review, a path for the future of this prairie oasis has yet to be chosen. bram noble, School of Environment and Sustainabil-ity, University of Saskatchewan.The allen site: a Paleoindian Camp in southwestern ne-braska. Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth. Albuquerque: Univer-sity of New Mexico Press, 2007. xvi + 284 pp. Maps, figures, tables, references, index. $55.00 cloth.  Douglas Bamforth and his colleagues demonstrate in this edited volume the valuable role in modern archaeology for thoughtful reinvestigation of previously studied site locations and archaeological collections. Containing 14 chapters by 11 contributors, The Allen Site includes comprehensive paleoenvi-ronmental research and detailed reanalysis of cultural materials recovered from renowned excavations conducted in the Medi-cine Creek Basin between 1947 and 1949, deposits that hold a series of human occupations ranging from 10,550 to 8,000 radiocarbon years in age. These new studies provide valuable improvements to our understanding of environmental change and early human adaptations during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene on the Central Great Plains. The book also offers essential perspectives on the original paleontological and archaeological research in this region with a primary focus on the Allen Site (although updated geomorphic and paleoenvi-ronmental information is presented for the nearby sites of Red Smoke, Lime Creek, and Stafford). Book	Reviews 129©	2009	Center	for	Great	Plains	Studies,	University	of	Nebraska–Lincoln The first chapter presents an introduction to the project and its research questions by principal investigator Douglas Bamforth. The second, by the late E. Mott Davis (the project’s original principal investigator), provides historical perspective on earlier research. Chapters 3 through 7 lay out the study’s en-vironmental background and should be of particular interest to students and researchers of Great Plains environments and their dynamics though time, demonstrating, as they do, how signifi-cantly environmental conditions differed from today’s. David May’s careful work on alluvial stratigraphy clearly illustrates how local variation in landforms can affect the processes of site formation. Sedimentation rates slowed during the Early Holo-cene, resulting in the formation of stable surfaces containing the most substantial archaeological deposits. Study of the lim-ited sample of freshwater mussels (25 valves) by Robert Warren indicates a slowly aggrading floodplain between 10,700-7,600 cal BC when these sites were first occupied. Medicine Creek seems to have been a relatively high-discharge stream with a meandering, coarse-bedded channel and muddy backwater ponds. Today such aquatic environments in the Great Plains are usually found much closer to the Missouri River.  Proxy indicators of past vegetation communities studied by Linda Scott Cummings, Thomas Moutoux, and L. Anthony Zalucha are augmented with a high-resolution archaeoclimatic model under the guidance of the late Reid Bryson. Between 10,850 BP and 7,600 BP, it appears that short grasses decreased in abundance while warm-season tall grasses increased within the valley, reflecting higher water tables and changes in sea-sonal flooding regimes. During this period, the uplands con-tained a greater abundance of tall grasses in comparison with the short-grass dominated community of today. Interestingly, a severe decline in spruce pollen is recorded at Lime Creek prior to 13,720 BP, suggesting this shift may have occurred more than 1,000 years earlier in southwestern Nebraska than at other loca-tions to the north and east. Gallery forests seem to have become established in the region shortly after this time. Studies of the archaeological artifacts and features (Douglas Bamforth and Mark Becker) and faunal remains (Jean Hudson) from the Allen Site are contained in chapters 8 through 14. Animal remains indicate a progressively more generalized and mobile subsistence strategy through time at Allen. Here and in other publications, Bamforth has used data from the Allen Site to argue for distinctive kinds of Paleoindian land use and lifeways that contrast with current models sometimes characterized as high-tech mobile foraging. For this reason alone, the archaeo-logical data presented in this volume provide a critical basis for evaluating the empirical foundations of such arguments. Bamforth and his colleagues should be commended for bringing contemporary research questions and modern meth-ods to bear at this important place, which had been largely underappreciated by the scientific community of researchers interested in the postglacial history of the Great Plains. Ongo-ing work at similar sites such as Claussen (Kansas) and Clary Ranch (Nebraska) among others will likely offer continued opportunities to reexamine and refine the interpretations that have now been developed at Medicine Creek. Daniel s. amick, Department of Anthropology, Loyola University, Chicago.Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail. By Keith Heyer Meldahl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xxi + 329 pp. Maps, figures, notes, glossary, bibli-ography, index. $25.00 cloth, $17.00 paper.  The dust jacket of Hard Road West promises familiar plea-sures to John McPhee lovers, and so I picked the book up with great anticipation. McPhee’s works have greatly heightened the interest of writers and readers in the genre of creative nonfic-tion, and while for me, Keith Meldahl’s work does not quite reach McPhee’s stratospheric heights, for the right audience it is definitely a very good read. The book is organized from east to west, forward in time, following in detail the wagon trail journey to the California gold fields. That human migration, driven by the search for geologic riches, provides the path for Meldahl’s foray into the deep geo-logic history of the landscape traversed. Human and geologic threads are coarsely interwoven, alternating sections describ-ing how the rocks and the landscape came to be with sections on the human travails, choices, failures, and successes as the travelers navigated a beautiful but often unforgiving landscape. Occasionally, differences between the human landscape of the gold rush times and the present are also commented on.  Meldahl gives special attention to what the migrants noted about the landscape and geology. From a modern perspective they had more questions than insights, but the juxtaposition of their thoughts against our modern understanding implicitly highlights the tremendous strides made by geologic science. Quotes from the travelers’ logs and letters are well deployed to strengthen the connection between the geologic landscape and the travelers’ experiences. Given the trying conditions of the trail, their thoughts about the landscape were not always posi-tive. Water can be seen as a fundamental human issue for the West then as now. The human story is not glorified, but appears as the stark and bitter reality it must have been (carcasses ga-lore). Relief is provided at points by travelers’ positive reactions to spots of sublime beauty and to geologic oddities encountered on the way, such as at Soda Springs (in present-day Idaho). Meldahl is a geologist, and it is fair to say geologic sto-ries dominate here, such as the recent rebirth of the Rockies (the great exhumation), the plate tectonic-driven birth of the Cordillera, the crustal stretching of the Basin and Range, the Yellowstone hotspot, and the origin of the gold. The result is a fairly comprehensive and distinctive overview of the geology of the western half of the U.S., organized by the accidental way the artifacts of this geologic history happen to be encountered on 

Book Review: \u3ci\u3eThe Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth

UNL | Libraries

University of Nebraska - Lincoln 
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 
Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and 
Social Sciences Great Plains Studies, Center for 
2009 
Book Review: The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern 
Nebraska Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth 
Daniel S. Amick 
Loyola University Chicago 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsresearch 
 Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons 
Amick, Daniel S., "Book Review: The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska Edited by 
Douglas B. Bamforth" (2009). Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences. 1000. 
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsresearch/1000 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at 
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Research: A 
Journal of Natural and Social Sciences by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - 
Lincoln. 
Great	Plains	Research	Vol.	19	No.	1,	2009128
©	2009	Center	for	Great	Plains	Studies,	University	of	Nebraska–Lincoln
decentralized governance will necessarily inhibit cooperation 
to protect watersheds. Even with comprehensive governing 
institutions, there are bound to be different interests with com-
peting goals that need to be coordinated. The more fragmented 
polycentric governance may be better at representing interests 
and no worse at facilitating cooperation. There is no one-size-
fits-all solution; rather, different governance structures should 
and do emerge.
 The analysis presented in each chapter is focused on con-
cepts that are examined and applied in a case study to explain 
the existing system of governance. Although the concepts are 
not integrated into a framework, the authors’ careful use of 
concepts provides insights into watershed decision making. Just 
as concepts are not integrated into a grand framework, there 
is no prescription for the best type of governance. This may 
disappoint those seeking the answer to watershed governance, 
but the book provides realistic analyses of the complex manage-
ment problems of watersheds. Perhaps in the future, additional 
research will more definitely link governance structures to 
types of watershed problems, different locales, and desired 
environmental outcomes. For the present, however, Schlager 
and Blomquist have provided a thoughtful examination of wa-
tershed governance that can be read and appreciated by scholars 
across multiple disciplines. sandra K. Davis, Department of 
Political Science, Colorado State University.
The Great sand Hills: a Prairie oasis. Text by Rebecca L. 
Grambo. Photographs by Branimir Gjetvaj. Regina, SK: Nature 
Saskatchewan, 2007. 124 pp. Photographs, appendices, bibliog-
raphy, index. C$24.95 paper.
 The Great Sand Hills region of southwestern Saskatchewan 
is among the largest and, unfortunately, last intact native prairie 
ecosystems in the Great Plains. The Great Sand Hills: A Prairie 
Oasis is thus a fitting title. Filled with spectacular photography 
alongside narrative text telling the story of the prairie’s past, 
present, and future, this 124-page book was a finalist for the 
2007 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award as well as in the 
nonfiction and scholarly writing categories.
 The first of the volume’s three sections provides a condensed 
physical and human history of the Great Plains, describing the 
glacial events leading up to the formation and then subsequent 
natural and cultural evolution of the Great Sand Hills land-
scape. Rebecca Grambo covers a lot of ground, eloquently tell-
ing the region’s history from its first cultural inhabitants and the 
rise and fall of the Plains bison, to the emergence of a ranching 
lifestyle and the cultivation of the surrounding mixed-prairie 
landscape. The text is interspersed with stories and narratives 
of homesteaders extracted from personal memoirs. 
 In part two Grambo paints a picture of the current landscape 
of the Great Sand Hills, describing the region’s physical geog-
raphy and concentrating largely on the ecology and sensitivity 
of the landscape, but also emphasizing a cultural connectivity 
forged by a history of local ranching activity. 
 The third section, pointing toward the future, describes the 
development of several land use planning initiatives, includ-
ing the most recent Great Sand Hills Regional Environmental 
Study—a response to emerging concerns over the cumulative 
effects of ranching activity, a growing natural gas industry with 
more than 1,500 wells in the less than 2,000 square kilometer 
area of active dunes and mixed-grass prairie, and the resulting 
network of roads and trails that now fragment parts of the land-
scape. 
 Grambo concludes with a discussion centered on “choosing 
our path,” arguing that “the choice about further development 
seems obvious” and that “there should be no further gas explo-
ration and development” in the Great Sand Hills. Unfortunately, 
the choice is not this simple. In many areas of the Great Sand 
Hills leases for gas development have already been sold; future 
development in them is inevitable. That said, much of this 
prairie oasis remains intact. In 2007, an independent scientific 
committee presented the government of Saskatchewan with 
three land use options for the future of the Great Sand Hills, 
each representing more or less ambitious development futures, 
the resulting implications for biodiversity, and a recommenda-
tion for a preferred option focused on maintaining the ecologi-
cal integrity of the landscape. Unfortunately, at the time of this 
review, a path for the future of this prairie oasis has yet to be 
chosen. bram noble, School of Environment and Sustainabil-
ity, University of Saskatchewan.
The allen site: a Paleoindian Camp in southwestern ne-
braska. Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth. Albuquerque: Univer-
sity of New Mexico Press, 2007. xvi + 284 pp. Maps, figures, 
tables, references, index. $55.00 cloth. 
 Douglas Bamforth and his colleagues demonstrate in this 
edited volume the valuable role in modern archaeology for 
thoughtful reinvestigation of previously studied site locations 
and archaeological collections. Containing 14 chapters by 11 
contributors, The Allen Site includes comprehensive paleoenvi-
ronmental research and detailed reanalysis of cultural materials 
recovered from renowned excavations conducted in the Medi-
cine Creek Basin between 1947 and 1949, deposits that hold 
a series of human occupations ranging from 10,550 to 8,000 
radiocarbon years in age. These new studies provide valuable 
improvements to our understanding of environmental change 
and early human adaptations during the Terminal Pleistocene 
and Early Holocene on the Central Great Plains. The book also 
offers essential perspectives on the original paleontological and 
archaeological research in this region with a primary focus on 
the Allen Site (although updated geomorphic and paleoenvi-
ronmental information is presented for the nearby sites of Red 
Smoke, Lime Creek, and Stafford). 
Book	Reviews 129
©	2009	Center	for	Great	Plains	Studies,	University	of	Nebraska–Lincoln
 The first chapter presents an introduction to the project 
and its research questions by principal investigator Douglas 
Bamforth. The second, by the late E. Mott Davis (the project’s 
original principal investigator), provides historical perspective 
on earlier research. Chapters 3 through 7 lay out the study’s en-
vironmental background and should be of particular interest to 
students and researchers of Great Plains environments and their 
dynamics though time, demonstrating, as they do, how signifi-
cantly environmental conditions differed from today’s. David 
May’s careful work on alluvial stratigraphy clearly illustrates 
how local variation in landforms can affect the processes of site 
formation. Sedimentation rates slowed during the Early Holo-
cene, resulting in the formation of stable surfaces containing 
the most substantial archaeological deposits. Study of the lim-
ited sample of freshwater mussels (25 valves) by Robert Warren 
indicates a slowly aggrading floodplain between 10,700-7,600 
cal BC when these sites were first occupied. Medicine Creek 
seems to have been a relatively high-discharge stream with 
a meandering, coarse-bedded channel and muddy backwater 
ponds. Today such aquatic environments in the Great Plains are 
usually found much closer to the Missouri River. 
 Proxy indicators of past vegetation communities studied 
by Linda Scott Cummings, Thomas Moutoux, and L. Anthony 
Zalucha are augmented with a high-resolution archaeoclimatic 
model under the guidance of the late Reid Bryson. Between 
10,850 BP and 7,600 BP, it appears that short grasses decreased 
in abundance while warm-season tall grasses increased within 
the valley, reflecting higher water tables and changes in sea-
sonal flooding regimes. During this period, the uplands con-
tained a greater abundance of tall grasses in comparison with 
the short-grass dominated community of today. Interestingly, a 
severe decline in spruce pollen is recorded at Lime Creek prior 
to 13,720 BP, suggesting this shift may have occurred more than 
1,000 years earlier in southwestern Nebraska than at other loca-
tions to the north and east. Gallery forests seem to have become 
established in the region shortly after this time.
 Studies of the archaeological artifacts and features (Douglas 
Bamforth and Mark Becker) and faunal remains (Jean Hudson) 
from the Allen Site are contained in chapters 8 through 14. 
Animal remains indicate a progressively more generalized and 
mobile subsistence strategy through time at Allen. Here and in 
other publications, Bamforth has used data from the Allen Site to 
argue for distinctive kinds of Paleoindian land use and lifeways 
that contrast with current models sometimes characterized as 
high-tech mobile foraging. For this reason alone, the archaeo-
logical data presented in this volume provide a critical basis for 
evaluating the empirical foundations of such arguments.
 Bamforth and his colleagues should be commended for 
bringing contemporary research questions and modern meth-
ods to bear at this important place, which had been largely 
underappreciated by the scientific community of researchers 
interested in the postglacial history of the Great Plains. Ongo-
ing work at similar sites such as Claussen (Kansas) and Clary 
Ranch (Nebraska) among others will likely offer continued 
opportunities to reexamine and refine the interpretations that 
have now been developed at Medicine Creek. Daniel s. amick, 
Department of Anthropology, Loyola University, Chicago.
Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush 
Trail. By Keith Heyer Meldahl. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2007. xxi + 329 pp. Maps, figures, notes, glossary, bibli-
ography, index. $25.00 cloth, $17.00 paper. 
 The dust jacket of Hard Road West promises familiar plea-
sures to John McPhee lovers, and so I picked the book up with 
great anticipation. McPhee’s works have greatly heightened the 
interest of writers and readers in the genre of creative nonfic-
tion, and while for me, Keith Meldahl’s work does not quite 
reach McPhee’s stratospheric heights, for the right audience it 
is definitely a very good read.
 The book is organized from east to west, forward in time, 
following in detail the wagon trail journey to the California gold 
fields. That human migration, driven by the search for geologic 
riches, provides the path for Meldahl’s foray into the deep geo-
logic history of the landscape traversed. Human and geologic 
threads are coarsely interwoven, alternating sections describ-
ing how the rocks and the landscape came to be with sections 
on the human travails, choices, failures, and successes as the 
travelers navigated a beautiful but often unforgiving landscape. 
Occasionally, differences between the human landscape of the 
gold rush times and the present are also commented on. 
 Meldahl gives special attention to what the migrants noted 
about the landscape and geology. From a modern perspective 
they had more questions than insights, but the juxtaposition 
of their thoughts against our modern understanding implicitly 
highlights the tremendous strides made by geologic science. 
Quotes from the travelers’ logs and letters are well deployed to 
strengthen the connection between the geologic landscape and 
the travelers’ experiences. Given the trying conditions of the 
trail, their thoughts about the landscape were not always posi-
tive. Water can be seen as a fundamental human issue for the 
West then as now. The human story is not glorified, but appears 
as the stark and bitter reality it must have been (carcasses ga-
lore). Relief is provided at points by travelers’ positive reactions 
to spots of sublime beauty and to geologic oddities encountered 
on the way, such as at Soda Springs (in present-day Idaho).
 Meldahl is a geologist, and it is fair to say geologic sto-
ries dominate here, such as the recent rebirth of the Rockies 
(the great exhumation), the plate tectonic-driven birth of the 
Cordillera, the crustal stretching of the Basin and Range, the 
Yellowstone hotspot, and the origin of the gold. The result is a 
fairly comprehensive and distinctive overview of the geology of 
the western half of the U.S., organized by the accidental way the 
artifacts of this geologic history happen to be encountered on 


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Book Review: \u3ci\u3eThe Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Douglas B. Bamforth

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