A final site type category to be considered in this section is that of Archaic Period Block 3 provisioning and initial reduction sites. A relatively large number of sites are found on the lower terraces of major watercourses. The sites can be characterized as exposed, open air sites featuring cortical reduction debris where the majority of material is chert or chalcedony, and the tools are discarded bifacial tools and points. The process appears to have consisted of obtaining chert cobbles from the river bed during low water seasons and opening the cobbles in the riverbed to evaluate the knapping quality of the material. Some percentage of cobbles deemed suitable for further reduction were then transported to the terrace above, where knapping occurred. Sites rich in chert were not exclusively encountered on these river bank areas, but these production sites were abundant in cortical material and the mean flake sizes were relatively large.

These kinds of sites were encountered most frequently on the very edges of terraces but this was perhaps due in part to the greater visibility from erosion along the terrace margins. The sites are otherwise exposed and appear to have been an unlikely place for residential occupation. The profiles of cut banks were investigated at some of these sites and stratified deposits were rarely observed eroding from the cutbanks. The 2003 season survey did not encounter chert raw material in its original geological context, it was only found in the bed of streams in the Block 3 area. As a consequence, it appears that most of the chert artifacts recovered during the 2003 season were probably knapped along these river terrace margins, and it is difficult to assign a time period to these early production sites. There was no strong patterning with the temporally diagnostic point styles and the material types used in Block 3 during the Archaic Foragers period. Points were made from chert and obsidian in Block 3 throughout the Archaic and obsidian points were frequently found on river terrace margins surrounded by chert knapping debris.