248 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 179 



well provided with lakes and running streams. Although Kay's anal- 

 ysis of Plateau political and social organization indicates that the 

 region had strong Plateau affinities (Ray, 1939, p. 145), its cultural 

 position in prehistoric times cannot be defined until further excava- 

 tions are made there. 



EARLY PLATEAU SITES 



Here and there in the Plateau there are traces of cultures that are 

 probably much more ancient than the materials from the Hat Creek 

 site. Cressman (1953, personal communication) has recently recov- 

 ered evidence of Early Man near The Dalles, Oreg. Details are lack- 

 ing at the present time, so comparisons cannot be made. At Lind 

 Coulee, near Moses Lake, Wash., Daugherty has recently recovered 

 evidence of Early Man (Daugherty, 1956). Again, details are not 

 available, but Daugherty states that his materials bear no resemblance 

 to the artifacts from Hat Creek. Radio carbon dates for the Lind 

 Coulee site averaged in the neighborhood of 8,700 years. 



The theory that a widespread Paleo-Indian culture existed in the 

 northwest was first advanced by Cressman. Although the majority 

 of his fieldwork has been carried on in the northern Great Basin, 

 Cressman until recently has been the only active archeologist in the 

 Pacific Northwest. He has, therefore, been an authority on the Pla- 

 teau, the northern Great Basin, and much of the Northwest Coast. 

 Cressman's interest has centered in Early Man and in the many prob- 

 lems connected with such a study. Availability of comparative 

 material for a time focused his attention to the south. He made com- 

 parative studies of Oregon cave materials with early cave materials 

 of the southern Great Basin and with certain artifact types from the 

 southwest. He did not, however, lose interest in the areas to the north 

 and northeast of the northern Great Basin. 



Cressman had formulated a theory that early man in the western 

 part of North America was divisible into two culture types (Cressman, 

 1950, p. 369). East of the Rocky Mountains was a hunting type of 

 culture typified by Folsom man. On the west of the mountains the 

 culture represented was a mixture of hmiting and gathering, char- 

 acterized by an abundance of grinding tools. The presence of these 

 tools in the west spelled a fundamental difference in culture to 

 Cressman. He felt that out of the early hunting and gather- 

 ing culture of the West, there developed a group of localized cultures, 

 and that the development of these had little if any relationship to 

 the Folsom and later developments east of the Rocky Mountains. 

 Looking to the future, he wrote : 



We shall eventually, by systematic extension of this work north and south 

 and east and west, discover whether there was a province of culture west of the 

 Rockies extending from far toward the Southwest well toward the Plateau re- 



