Joel Gunn

In the last 20 years, there has been considerable progress toward de-
fining the hydrologic context of the Paleoindian period in the southern
High Plains of the United States. These advances have been made thanks
to the considerable efforts of Haynes ( 1975), Holliday ( 1984, 1986),
Johnson ( 1983, 1986), Oldfield and Schoenwetter ( 1975), Stafford ( 1981),
and Wendorf ( 1975), to name a few. Also, efforts have been made to ex-
plain environmental changes in terms of global energy balance, which can
be measured as global average temperature ( Bryson et al., 1970; Gunn,
1979, 1987; Wendland, 1978).

Systematically linking regional climatic change to global climate pro-
vides four basic benefits. It enables prediction of future environments
while using past environments to test the underlying model. Future
changes may be either of natural or anthropogenic causes: volcanism, solar
irradiance, nuclear winter/fall, greenhouse warming, etc. Explanation in
terms of global climate, which in some circumstances can be measured
accurately at resolved time scales for tens of thousands of years into the
past (i.e., by ice cores and global volcanism chronologies), also allow ret-
rodiction of prehistoric regional climates. Such retrodictions provide ad-
ditional perspectives on existing empirical data, and suggest hypotheses
that extend interpretations beyond what the data themselves will yield.
These hypotheses can also be used to contain the cost of empirical re-
search at more-resolved time scales than is economically feasible by direct
analysis.

The Clovis phase of the southern High Plains is, as always, of intense
interest to archaeologists and paleontologists because it is the theater in
which the most dramatic and well-documented events of Pleistocene-
Holocene transition were played out. Scientific curiosity about this pe-
riod, however, has vastly broadened in recent years. It is a promising era
for global climatic research because it is a period of rapid global warming,
perhaps an analogy for coming decades of global greenhouse warming
( Broeker and Denton, 1990). Add to this the fact that the Plains environ-
ment provides a promising repository of paleoclimatic proxy records, and

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