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Preliminary Report on the Leonard Rockshelter Site Pershing County, Nevada*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Robert F. Heizer*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Extract

In september, 1949, while in west central Nevada for the purpose of collecting vegetal materials from the lowermost cultural levels of Lovelock cave (Loud and Harrington, 1929) to be used for radiocarbon dating, the author revisited an open rockshelter site some six miles up the valley from Lovelock cave. The site, since named Leonard rockshelter (site 26- Pe-14) after Zenas Leonard who in 1833 traversed the Humbolt Sink area as a member of the Walker expedition (Leonard, 1904), is not referred to by Loud and Harrington. It is the same site from which, in 1936, Thomas Derby mined bat guano and recovered artifacts described in a brief article (Heizer, 1938). The bat guano formed a layer two to three feet thick lying on ancient gravels of Lake Lahontan and beneath a thick accumulation of aeolian dust and rockfall.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1951

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Footnotes

*

For the success of the 1950 Nevada excavations, the University of California is indebted to the following: J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby of the Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago, for radiocarbon analyses; L. Fransden, Land Commissioner of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Jesse L. Nusbaum of the National Park Service; G. Momberg, manager of Lovelock Properties Inc. (formerly the Nevada-Nile Corp.); and to the members of the crew–Clara Stern, James Robson, Gordon Grosscup, Cherie Gregoire, Mary Elizabeth Hall, Martin Baumhoff, Norman Roust, Albert Elsasser, Winifred Hawxhurst, John Costa, Arnold Pilling (Assistant), Thomas Bolt and Harry Millman. We are particularly indebted to Ernst Antevs for helping us interpret stratigraphy and for research on Lake Lahontan shoreline features in the Humboldt basin. He has read and commented on this paper, an assistance which the author gratefully acknowledges. Antevs should not be held responsible for any faulty statements or interpretations contained herein.

References

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