Facts and opinions are given that contest Berlin’s specific condemnation of a single excavation at Tikal, Guatemala, and his general censure of the Tikal Project.

Although Braje and Erlandson express concern with my inclusion of Santa Cruz Island sites containing small quantities of red abalone shells with red abalone middens on the other Channel Islands, doing so is justified because of the discrete period of time during which they occur. They also feel that I should have expanded the scope of my paper to include consideration of relationship between sea otters and red abalone, but this was beyond the intent of my report. Nonetheless, I point out that more explication is needed of the nature of sea otter hunting if its effects on red abalone availability are to be understood.

Robert Heizer excavated Leonard Rockshelter (26Pe14) in western Nevada more than 70 years ago. He described stratified cultural deposits spanning the Holocene. He also reported obsidian flakes purportedly associated with late Pleistocene sediments, suggesting that human use extended even farther back in time. Because Heizer never produced a final report, Leonard Rockshelter faded into obscurity despite the possibility that it might contain a Clovis Era or older occupation. That possibility prompted our team of researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno and Desert Research Institute to return to the site in 2018 and 2019. We relocated the excavation block from which Heizer both recovered the flakes and obtained a late Pleistocene date on nearby sediments. We minimally excavated undisturbed deposits to rerecord and redate the strata. As an independent means of evaluating Heizer's findings, we also directly dated 12 organic artifacts housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Our work demonstrates that people did not visit Leonard Rockshelter during the late Pleistocene. Rather, they first visited the site immediately following the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,700 cal BP) and sporadically used the shelter, mostly to store gear, throughout the Holocene.