88 J. Alan Holman and Jerry N. McDonald 



lying below 530 m elevation are late Wisconsinan or Holocene in age 

 (McDonald 1984, 1985a). The older of these late Wisconsinan sedi- 

 ments are fluvial deposits, laid down alongside or in the channel of the 

 extinct Saltville River before its capture by upstream piracy around 

 14,000 B.P. (McDonald and Bartlett 1983). The oldest and most exten- 

 sive of these fluvial deposits is a sheet of rounded gravel (Unit W4: peb- 

 bles to cobbles), containing numerous bones and teeth of large mam- 

 mals and a few lag boulders, that occurs over much of the valley 

 bottom. This unit is considered to have been deposited by one or more 

 floods between ca. 27,000 and 14,500 B.P. Within the channel of the 

 Saltville River are finer grained, in places well and differentially sorted, 

 fluvial sediments (Unit W3). These sediments apparently were laid down 

 over a relatively short period as bed load from moderate fluctuations in 

 stream stage/ transport capacity, just prior to the piracy of the Saltville 

 River. 



A shallow lake — Lake Totten (McDonald 1985b) — formed fol- 

 lowing the loss of the Saltville River, and persisted as the dominant 

 hydrologic feature of the valley throughout most or all of the subse- 

 quent 14,000 years. Some small streams, mostly spring fed, also proba- 

 bly entered the valley during this period. As a consequence of this 

 changed hydrology, fine lacustrine and marsh sediments, primarily mas- 

 sive clays (Units W2, H2), occur over all of the valley below 530 m in 

 elevation and extend over an undetermined part of the upper valley 

 lying above 530 m. The only significant interruption of this clay 

 sequence is a mud-soil-peat mosaic that formed or was deposited over 

 part of the valley around 10,500 to 10,000 B.P., at a time when the 

 water table was lowered in the middle (and upper?) valley. No evidence 

 of an equally lowered water table has been found in the lower valley. A 

 shallow lake and marsh of some 200 acres (about 80 square hectometers) 

 existed in the valley when the first land patents to European settlers 

 were issued late in the 18th Century (Ogle 1981). 



STRATIGRAPHY OF THE SITES 



SV-1 lies directly over the southeast side of the Saltville River chan- 

 nel and, as a result, it contains all of the primary Wisconsinan-Holocene 

 stratigraphic units recognized to date (Fig. 2). Since excavations began 

 at this site in October 1980, more than 3,000 vertebrate specimens have 

 been removed from some 200 m of excavated area. Vertebrate remains 

 have been found in all stratigraphic units. Most fossils, however, have 

 been found near the bottom of the lower lake clay (Unit W2: ca. 13,500 

 B.P.), in the sand and fine gravel deposits of the channel bottom (Unit 

 W3: ca. 14,500 to 13,500 B.P.), and in the coarser gravel sheet (Unit 

 W4: ca. 27,000 to 14,500 B.P.). 



Most (18 of 26) of the herptile specimens described in this paper 

 came from SV-1. Twelve specimens were recovered from the channel 

 bottom deposits (Unit W3), which have also yielded large numbers of 



