David Kilby

Dr. David Kilby
Professor
Email: david.kilby@txstate.edu
Office: ELA 247

Education
Ph.D. - University of New Mexico, 2008
M.A. - Eastern New Mexico University
B.A - Appalachian State University

Research Interests:
North American Paleoindians, hunter-gatherer archaeology, Southwest prehistory, the organization of lithic technology, geoarchaeology, paleoenvironments, landscape archaeology, human evolutionary ecology, Cultural Resource Management and applied archaeology.

Current Research:
My primary research interest is the archaeology of the earliest inhabitants of the Americas, with particular emphasis on the relationship between Ice Age foragers and the changing physical environment of the North American Southern Plains, West, and Southwest. I maintain a secondary but sustained research interest in the Formative Period cultures of the North American Southwest. In addition to academic research, I have over 15 years of experience in Cultural Resource Management.

Much of my research focuses on landscape archaeology of early North American hunter-gatherers, relying on lithic technology, spatial analysis of artifact and site distributions, raw material provenance studies, and concepts derived from technological organization and behavioral ecology to reconstruct the organization and movements of Late Pleistocene foragers. An ongoing research program investigates Clovis-age caching as a strategy for maintaining access to critical resources under conditions of high mobility. Caches provide unique research opportunities because they contain tools preserved in their useful state at strategic locations, as opposed to the depleted artifacts that were routinely abandoned at other sites. Additional research focuses on the archaeological record of Folsom and later Paleoindian periods.

I am co-director of the Ancient Southwest Texas Project, through which I conduct field research in the Lower Pecos canyonlands. Primary fieldwork is focused on Bonfire Shelter, a classic rock shelter site that includes multiple layers of bison bone that may represent the oldest known bison jump in North America, along with both older and younger deposits that provide windows into prehistoric hunter-gatherer use of this unique environment. In addition to these avenues of research, I am continuing archaeological and paleoenvironmental research at Blackwater Draw, NM (the Clovis site), including the investigation of two stratified bison bone beds in Folsom and Cody-aged deposits, along with the exploratory investigation of two Paleoindian localities containing lithic artifacts and Pleistocene fauna in the Texas panhandle.

Selected Publications

Edited Volumes and Compilations

Kilby, J. D., & Huckell, B. B. (In Preparation).The Paleoindian Southwest. University of Utah Press.

Huckell, Bruce B. and J. David Kilby (editors)
2014 Clovis Caches: Recent Discoveries and New Research. University of New Mexico Press.

J.David Kilby (editor)
2012 Geology, Archaeology, and Climate Change at Blackwater Draw, New Mexico: F. Earl Green and the Geoarchaeology of the Clovis Type Site, by C. Vance Haynes and James M. Warnica, ENMU Contributions in Anthropology No. 15, Portales, NM.

Huckell, Bruce B. and J. David Kilby (compilers)
2004 Readings in Late Pleistocene North America and Early Paleoindians: Selections from American Antiquity. SAA Reader Series No. 2. Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Kilby, J. D., Farrell, S. P., & Hamilton, M. J. (2020). New Investigations at Bonfire Shelter, Texas Examine Controversial Bison Jumps and Bone Beds. Plains Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1080/00320447.2020.1812795

Kilby, J. D., & Hronec, L. (2020). Evaluating the Integrity of Blackwater Draw’s Locality X: The Role of Wind in the Formation of a Late Prehistoric Site on the Southern High Plains. Journal of Texas Archeology and History 6.

Thevenot, J.-P., Kilby, J. D., & Pelegrine, J. (2019). Les Silex de VolguRevisités (The Volgu Flints Revisited). In Les silex solutréens de Volgu (Rigny-sur-Arroux, Saône-et-Loire, France): un sommet dans l’art de lapierre taillée (pp. 141–146/177–181). Dijon, France: Revue Archéologique de l’Est de la France.

Buchanan, B. B., Hamilton, M. J., & Kilby, J. D. (2019). The Small-World Topology of Clovis Networks. Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0767-7

J. David Kilby
2019 A North American Perspective on the Volgu Biface Cache from Upper Paleolithic France and its Relationship to the “Solutrean Hypothesis” for Clovis Origins. Quaternary International

Buchanan, B. B., Andrews, B., Kilby, J. D., & Eren, M. (2018). Settling into the country: Comparison of Clovis and Folsom lithic networks in western North America shows increasing redundancy of toolstone use. Journal of Archaeological Science, 53, 32–42.

Buchanan, Briggs B., Marcus J. Hamilton, J. David Kilby, and Joseph Gingerich
2016 Lithic networks reveal early regionalization in late Pleistocene North America. Journal of Archaeological Science 65:114–121.

Kilby, J. David and Scott A. Woodstuff
2015 Dating an Exotic Marine Shell from a Potential Clovis Cache: A Tale of Assemblage Drift in the Franey Cache from Western Nebraska. PaleoAmerica 1(2):206-209.

J. David Kilby
2015 A Regional Perspective on Clovis Blades and Blade Caching. In Clovis: On the Edge of a New Understanding, edited by Tom Jennings and Ashley Smallwood, pp. 145-159. Center for the Study of the First Americans; Texas A&M University, College Station.

J. David Kilby
2014 Direction and Distance in Clovis Caching: The Movement of People and Lithic Raw Materials on the Clovis-age Landscape. In Clovis Caches: Recent Discoveries and New Research., edited by Bruce B. Huckell and J. David Kilby, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

J. David Kilby and Bruce B. Huckell
2013 Clovis Caches: Current Perspectives and Future Directions. In PaleoAmerican Odyssey, edited by Kelly Graf, Ted Goebel, and Michael Waters, pp. 257-272. Center for the Study of the First Americans; Texas A&M University, College Station.

Buchanan, Briggs B., J. David Kilby, Bruce B. Huckell, Michael O’Brien, and Mark Collard.
2012 A Morphometric Assessment of the Function of Cached Clovis Points. PLoS ONE 7(2):e30530. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030530.

Huckell, Bruce B., J. David Kilby, Matthew Boulanger, and Michael Glascock
2011 Sentinel Butte: Neutron Activation Analysis of White River Group Chert From a Primary Source and Artifacts From a Clovis Cache in North Dakota, USA. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:965-976.

J. David Kilby
2011 Les Caches Clovis Dans le Cadre du Paléoindien Ancien en Amérique du Nord (Clovis Caches and the Early Paleoindian Record of North America). In Peuplements et Préhistoire de l'Amérique, edited by Denis Vialou. Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France.

Huckell, Bruce B. and J. David Kilby
2009 Beach: A Clovis Cache in Southwestern North Dakota. Current Research in the Pleistocene 26:68-69.

J. David Kilby, Jim Gallison, Roberto Herrera, David Wilcox, and Valerie Renner.
2005 Demolition Road: A New Clovis Site in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Current Research in the Pleistocene 23. Co-authors:

Huckell, Bruce B. and J. David Kilby
2003 Folsom Point Production at the Rio Rancho Site, New Mexico. In Folsom Technology and Lifeways, edited by John Clark and Michael Collins, pp. 11-29. Lithic Technology Special Publication No. 4, University of Tulsa.

Courses Taught

Anthropology 2302 | Introduction to Archaeology
Anthropology 3315 | Archaeology of the Southwest
Anthropology 3338 | Geoarchaeology
Anthropology 3361 | Archaeological Field Methods
Anthropology 3376/5374 | Archaeology of Early Americans
Anthropology 4339 | Theoretical Foundations of Archaeology
Anthropology 5313 | Seminar in Archaeology
Anthropology 5308/7308 | Cultural Resource Management Archaeology