Evidence for late paleoindian ritual from the Caradoc site (AfHj-104), southwestern Ontario, Canada

The Curadoc site, dating ca. 10,500 to 10,000 B.P., provides a rare glimpse of scared ritual among the earliest well-documented inhabitants of the Americas. It is a kind of site never before reported, where the majority of the artifacts have been purposefully broken or sacrificed. The site yielded 302, mainly chert, lithic fragments that fit together to form at least 71 artifacts. The material includes an unfluted concave-based point, three bifacial knives, 31 unfinished bifaces, 27 unifaces and nine non-siliceous items. Distributional analyses indicate that: 1) the material was initially spread over an area of as much as 12 m(2); 2) the items were constrained in their distribution and could have been in a structure; and 3) the artifacts were broken at the location where they were found.