North America - Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (147 Records)
The Carrizo Plain National Monument contains some of the most significant heritage resources in North America. This includes the 100 Native American habitation and pictograph sites within the Carrizo Plain Archaeological District National Historic Landmark. Appropriate management is critical to the preservation of these sensitive resources. The results of GIS modeling can be directly applied toward a wide variety of historic preservation approaches. This presentation will describe the...
Predictive Modeling of Archeological Sites in Death Valley National Park (2015)
Predictive Modeling of Archeological Sites in Death Valley National Park Lindsey Cochran and Tad Britt. Archeologists have long worked to develop predictive modeling tools, techniques, and methods, as it is well known that human habitation locations are patterned and often align with environmental constraints. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) and the National Park Service (NPS) have developed methods to move a database with over 2,000 archaeological sites...
Prehistoric High Elevation Seasonal Use in Wyoming: Results of Flaked Stone Analysis from High Rise Village (2015)
The analysis of flaked stone procured from 10 of High Rise Village’s 52 habitation features provided a unique glimpse into high-elevation prehistoric hunter-gatherer behaviors in western Wyoming, including occupational intensity, and settlement and subsistence behaviors. Rather than a hunting-focused and/or intensive logistical-residential settlement-subsistence strategy described throughout the Rocky Mountains and Intermountain West, High Rise Village was evidently targeted for specific...
Preliminary results from the Paleoindian record of Guano Valley, Oregon (2017)
Guano Valley is located between Warner and Catlow valleys. Relative to the surrounding valleys, it has received little attention from professional archaeologists over the years despite early visits by Luther Cressman. During the 2016 field season, the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit (University of Nevada, Reno) began a long-term research project in Guano Valley focused on searching for Paleoindian sites in the area. Although our work is in its infancy, we have already uncovered a very rich...
Preliminary Results of Geophysical Surveys Along the Middle Fork Salmon River, Idaho (2015)
The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness is the largest designated wilderness in the lower 48 states encompassing over two million acres and two wild and scenic rivers (Salmon River and Middle Fork Salmon River) in central Idaho. Cultural resources were identified as one of the main tenets of the establishing legislation and the Central Idaho Wilderness Act of 1980 mandates "the protection of archaeological sites and interpretation of such sites for the public benefit and knowledge."...
Processing, Power, Teaching and Identity, The Utilitarian and Ritual Use of Artifacts from a Middle Archaic Shaman's House in the Great Basin. (2016)
In 2013 Western Cultural Management excavated a well preserved structure in the Great Basin. The structure dates to 3000 cal. BP and is one of few that have been discovered of this antiquity in the Great Basin region. The house was associated with a number of artifacts. Many of the tools were clearly associated with artiodactyl processing tasks within discrete activity areas. Other artifacts such as complete bi-point knives, complete projectile points, quartz crystals, fulgurites, ochre,...
The Promontory Caves Plant Macrofossil Record (2017)
The dry deposits in Promontory Caves #1 and #2, northern Utah, contain abundant well-preserved plant materials related to the late prehistoric occupations there. Much of the plant macrofossil record in both caves, especially Cave #1, represents the manufacture of textiles, in particular the production of bulrush matting. Plant remains attributable to dietary use constitute a small part of the overall assemblage, consistent with the negligible evidence of plant food processing such as milling...
Protest Graffiti at the Historic Nevada Peace Camp (2015)
The Peace Camp, near the Nevada National Security Site, is the location where protesters have gathered for several decades to voice their opposition to nuclear testing and environmental issues. This National Register eligible property contains an abundance of archaeological features, such as rock cairns, tent pads, sweat lodges, and geoglyphs. Associated with these features are two concrete highway drainage tunnels that served as a passageway and a place of respite from the desert conditions. In...
Recent Advances in Fremont Archaeology of Northwest Colorado (2016)
To date Gilbert Wenger's 1956 thesis remains one of the most comprehensive studies completed on Fremont culture within the Colorado Bureau of Land Management, White River Field Office (WRFO). WRFO archaeologists have focused Section 110 program efforts over the course of the last four field seasons on Fremont sites documented by Wenger and others and also to identify new Fremont sites through archaeological field survey. This poster presentation provides a synthesis of inventory results...
Reevaluation of Site Chronology, Subsistence, and Unifacial Lithic Technology at the Connley Caves (35LK50), Lake County, Oregon (2016)
The Connley Caves are a series of rockshelters and caves eroded into a south-facing ridge of Miocene welded tuff, rhyolite and fine-grained basalt in the Fort Rock Basin of Oregon. Initially excavated by Stephen Bedwell in 1967-68, their deeply stratified late Pleistocene-early Holocene deposits produced rich lithic and faunal assemblages potentially associated with earliest radiocarbon ages of 10,600±190 and 11,200±200. The Connley Caves data played a major role in the development of Bedwell’s...
Relationships among Foraging Efficiency, Agricultural Investment, and Human Health in Fremont Societies (2016)
Marked variability in subsistence strategies has been noted throughout the Fremont archaeological culture. Previously, we have explored such variability by using data on baseline environmental productivity, zooarchaeological evidence for resource depression, and archaeological measures of the importance of agriculture to test the hypothesis that agricultural investment among the Fremont varied inversely with local environmental productivity. Data from throughout the Fremont region are consistent...
Religious Symbolism In Eastern California Ghost Dance Rock Paintings (2015)
There exists multi-colored, historic Native American rock paintings found throughout eastern California. In a minimum of 21 locations, Native, indigenous, polychromatic rock paintings have been documented that apparently date to a time period between 1870 and 1900 (Schiffman et al. 1983; Garfinkel 1978, 1982, 2005, 2007). These rock painting sites exhibit subject matter that may relate to revitalistic religious movements popular during this short 30 year time frame. Such paintings have been...
Rethinking Fremont Chronology (2016)
The dating of Fremont sites is based almost entirely on radiocarbon dates. A large number of dates exist from the region as a whole, but many of the largest Fremont sites are poorly dated. Most of the important sites excavated prior to the 1980s have at best a few dates, and many of the dates that do exist are on charcoal from structural wood. In some cases the only available dates are clearly centuries too early for the sites and structures they purport to date. In addition to problems with the...
The rise and fall of Lake Lahontan and the climactic implications for Paleoindian inhabitants of the Great Basin (2015)
The Lahontan Basin, a huge Pleistocene lake, located in the western Great Basin, northwestern Nevada, has had a long history of rising and falling water levels dependent on heavy precipitation and decreased evapotranspiration of the Pleistocene Ice Age climatic regime. Three subbasins occupy the western side of the Lahontan Basin and include Pyramid Lake, Winnemucca Lake and the Black Rock Desert-Smoke Creek subbasins; the focus of this presentation. The climatic implications of a filling and...
The rise and fall of the Great Basin Pleistocene lakes and the possible influence on early Paleoindian inhabitants (2016)
Few topics have been more profound than the subject of climate change at the end of the Pleistocene and early Holocene in the Great Basin of North America and the influence that such change may have had on the earliest human inhabitants. Rapidly shifting climate is exemplified by the filling and waning of internally drained pluvial lake basins. Two very large lakes intermittently occupied a huge part of the northern Great Basin throughout the Pleistocene. Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville...
Ritual for the Ancestors or Acts of Violence: Biocultural assessment of culturally modified human remains (2016)
A number of culturally modified human remains from three sites in Utah were reanalyzed with a biocultural approach that considered the poetics of violence and the role bodies play in cultural memory. The remains analyzed consisted of twenty-two individuals affiliated with the Fremont and Northern San Juan Puebloan cultures. The focus of this study was to transcend the surficial evidence of dismemberment and mutilation, and to view these bodies as cultural artifacts that could provide deeper...
The Rock Art of Valley of Fire, Clark County, Nevada (2015)
Valley of Fire is one of the gems of Nevada archaeology known as an area rich in archaeological resources. Yet little work had been undertaken in the area. Since 2003 the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) has conducted five survey field schools in Valley of Fire designed to teach students survey and site recording. The results so far demonstrate that Valley of Fire is an area rich in rock art and other cultural resources, with new rock art sites being recorded and data from earlier recorded...
Rock Art Resonance: preliminary results of an experimental acoustic study (2015)
Pecked petroglyphs of a prehistoric Mojave Desert slot canyon hint at experience crafting processes in rock image production. The unique qualities here not shared by other area petroglyph sites support the need to consider archaeological and geographic context of these sites as a critical variable, rather than an assumed constant. With narrow passages, dry falls, and towering vertical walls, the slot's metamorphosed limestone substrate yields the potential for sound characteristics not found at...
Searching for the "Paleoarchaic individual" and unique Paleoarchaic "production grammar" in the Great Basin (2017)
Archaeological investigations were conducted by Western Cultural Resource Management in the Fire Creek Archaeological District in the central Great Basin. We address the results of investigations at a Paleoarchaic site containing a buried soil with both an abundant stemmed point trajectory and a Levallois-like reduction method dating to the Younger Dryas. Employing agency theory and through an examination of depositional history, the chaîne opératoire and spatial analyses, we argue that the...
Seeking Congruency—Search Images, Archaeological Records, and Apachean Origins (2017)
Apachean prehistory presents a significant conundrum: remarkably resilient and pragmatic people, Athapaskan speakers consistently adopted many elements of the ceremonial life and material culture of their neighbors, making for profound archaeological challenges. How do we truly know when an archaeological record was created by Proto-Apachean ancestors? The best response to this challenge is to draw upon the independent strengths of anthropological, linguistic and genetic studies to develop a...
Settlement and the environment in the northwestern Great Basin (2016)
The Holocene in the northwest Great Basin is characterized by episodes of severe drought punctuated by abundant rainfall. Prehistoric people settled widely across the area against this variable ecological backdrop. Excavations for the Ruby Pipeline project have produced a wealth of data on prehistoric settlement patterns and chronologies in the northwestern Great Basin. In this paper, multiple lines of evidence are used to reconstruct chronologies of occupation that have been obscured by...
Site 26CK206 Near Atlatl Rock, Valley of Fire State Park, Clark County, Nevada: A Re-examination of Site Recording Techniques, Condition, and Interpretation After 50 Years (2016)
Although Valley of Fire has been mentioned in the archaeological literature since the 1930s (Harrington n.d.), the first real reconnaissance surveys were conducted by the Richard and Mary Shutler in 1961 (Shutler and Shutler 1962). They recorded 32 sites throughout the park, many of which were near present-day Atlatl Rock. One particular site, 26CK206, was recorded by the Shutlers at that time, and also partially by Heizer and Baumhoff (1962). In 2011 the CSN Valley of Fire survey project...
Spatial and Small-scale Geoarchaeological Analysis of a Middle Archaic Antelope Trap in Northeastern Nevada, U.S.A. (2015)
Great Basin Antelope Traps are ideal laboratories due to their feature system level focus on one set of subsistence behaviors (antelope hunting). By combining data collected using LiDAR, GPS and GIS, our analysis in the Liza Jane Trap focused on the spatial patterning of lithic artifacts and the location of small-scale landforms. The geoarchaeological analysis indicates relatively stable landforms modified by cultural-transforms. Analysis to locate small-scale landforms was performed to locate...
Stratigraphic integrity and large game hunting at Hogup Cave, Utah. (2015)
Utah’s Hogup Cave is an iconic example of the exceptional preservation and cultural depth present at Great Basin dry cave sites and has recently featured prominently in the debate related to the ascendancy of large game hunting in the late Holocene. However, concerns related to the stratigraphic integrity of the site has largely inhibited analysis of the cave’s assemblage since the site’s excavation and initial analysis in the late 1960’s. We utilize 15 new radiocarbon dates in conjunction with...
TERMINAL PLEISTOCENE-EARLY HOLOCENE LITHIC RAW MATERIAL CONVEYANCE AT PLUVIAL LAKE MOJAVE AND THE SOUTHERN CONVEYANCE ZONE, MOJAVE DESERT (2016)
This paper evaluates Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene (TP-EH) lithic raw material conveyance patterns around pluvial Lake Mojave and the southern conveyance zone proposed by Jones et al. (2003). Geologic samples from 12 fine-grained volcanic (FGV) source areas around Lake Mojave were submitted for xrf analysis to expand the regional database, and 50 FGV and obsidian artifacts from the Campbell collection and sites along the TP-EH shorelines of Lake Mojave were sourced by xrf to document the...