Hell Gap National Historic Landmark

Introduction

The Hell Gap site, occupied between about 13,000-8,500 years ago, is an important North American Paleoindian camp site that provides a continuous stratigraphic record of approximately 4,500 years of Paleoindian subsistence economies. Hell Gap is a breakthrough site in establishing the chronological relationships of many Paleoindian complexes on the Great Plains and across much of the North America. Prior to the site’s testing in 1959, Paleoindian cultures of the Great Plains were established largely from surface collections or from single-component, short-term occupation animal kill sites whose chronology and sequential relationships were unknown. With the discovery and excavation of Hell Gap, researchers could place the identified Paleoindian complexes (and two new complexes discovered at Hell Gap) into a sequence based on the site’s stratified deposits.

The site also provides some of the earliest evidence recovered of longer-term residential occupations by Paleoindian groups, as well as a variety of domestic activities not usually present at short use duration, single-function big game kills. Such domestic activities, too numerous to list individually, include food preparation, food consumption, resource sharing, production and maintenance of tools, child rearing, and taking care of elders or infirm band members. Hell Gap provided researchers with an unprecedented perspective on Paleoindian camp life of nine successive cultural periods, which surpasses the number of complexes found at most, if not all, other Paleoindian sites. Hell Gap drove the development of an alternative way of thinking about Paleoindian lifeways. The site demonstrated that Paleoindians were not strictly big game specialists, but also diverse and adaptable foragers. The combination of preserved faunal remains and lithics with extensive geoarcheological analysis provides a continuous record of thousands of years of Paleoindian subsistence economies, as well as evidence of changing environmental conditions during the terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene. As such, Hell Gap has proven to be critically important in defining Paleoindian adaptations that arose in response to changing climatic conditions during the terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene, the period at the end of the last ice age between about 14,000 and 8,000 years ago. (Adapted from National Historic Landmark nomination 2015)

The site investigations occurred in two distinct periods, from 1959 to 1966 and from 1992 to 2023. The current archive contains records from both of these sets of studies. As a result of changing field and lab procedures as well as significant evolution of field and lab recording strategies, he archives are complex. The general structure of this digital archive is: Illustrations (Negatives, Slides, and Photographs), Catalog Cards, Excavation Field Notes, Excavation Unit Maps, and Field Reports. Each of these sections is discussed in more detail under each heading.