North America - Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
126-147 (147 Records)
This paper represents a first attempt to reconstruct the occupation span of Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene foragers around pluvial Lake Mojave, Mojave Desert, California. Models suggest and research indicates that foragers were more sedentary and made shorter moves around large, productive resource patches (large lakes, marshes), but made more frequent and longer distance moves when resource patches were small and/or widely scattered. Lake Mojave at its Pleistocene maximum was 300 km2 and...
Terminal-Pleistocene Through Late Prehistoric Settlement Strategies around Pluvial Lake Mojave (Soda and Silver Lake Playas), California (2015)
Multiple lines of evidence are used to establish terminal Pleistocene-early Holocene (TP-EH) through Late Prehistoric spatio-temporal patterns and settlement strategies around pluvial Lake Mojave (more recently Soda and Silver Lake playas), California. Data from pedestrian survey and in-field analysis of lithic artifacts at four survey areas along the eastern shoreline of Soda and Silver Lake are analyzed using GIS to establish whether settlement strategies changed in accordance with variations...
Testing the Association of Chipped Stone Crescents with Wetlands and Paleo-Shorelines of Western North America: A GIS-based Spatial Analysis (2015)
We use ArcGIS and spatial analysis to quantitatively test a proposed association between chipped stone crescents and wetland environments in western North America. Dating between ~12,000 and 8,000 cal BP, crescents are often found in association with stemmed points of the Western Pluvial Lakes or Western Stemmed traditions. Many scholars have suggested that crescents served as transverse projectile points for hunting waterfowl, others have viewed them as more generalized and multi-purpose tools,...
Teton Archaeological Project: Preliminary Report of the 2014 Field Season (2015)
Following nearly a decade of high-elevation research in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, the Teton Archaeological Project seeks to record and interpret prehistoric alpine occupations of the Teton Range. The 2014 field season was multi-focused with three primary goals of; exploring previously unsurveyed areas for archaeological sites, investigating ice-patches for thawing artifacts, and testing the survivability of lipid biomarkers on high-elevation surface artifacts. The work performed in this...
Tiptoe the Steptoe: A Report on and Examination of Survey Results from Steptoe Valley and the Schell Creek Range of East-Central Nevada (2016)
This poster reports on results from 25,745 contiguous acres of pedestrian survey in southern Steptoe Valley and the Schell Creek Range of east-central Nevada. An extensive Class III cultural resource inventory conducted in 2014 and 2015 by EnviroSystems Management, Inc., resulted in the recordation of 285 new sites, seven previously documented sites, and 386 isolated artifacts/features. These resources span the entirety of human occupation in the Great Basin. Sites include Paleoindian, Archaic,...
Twentieth Century Geoglyphs - Military Training Targets of World War II (2015)
For archaeologists, the term geoglyph typically conjures up images of enormous carved landscapes such as the Nazca Lines in Peru or the Blythe Intaglios in California’s Mojave Desert. But the creation of earth drawings is not restricted to people of the distant past. Modern populations have also been known to produce their own geoglyphs. Like their prehistoric predecessors, many contemporary geoglyphs have spiritual or ceremonial significance, but others were generated for purely functional...
A Twist on Taphonomy: Catlow Twine Basketry in Archaeological Contexts (2015)
This presentation is a first attempt to trace the taphonomic trajectory of specimens of Catlow Twine, an important kind of basketry technology. Catlow Twine basketry spans over ~9,000 cal B.P. years in the archaeological record of the Great Basin. The longevity of this artifact class and its appearance throughout the Northern and Western Great Basin allows for a thorough investigation of how it has been used. Catlow Twine is simple close twine technology; one of the oldest techniques in the...
UAVs in Historic Archaeology: Case Studies from Virginia City and Aurora, Nevada (2016)
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’ are an emerging technology for use in archaeological investigation. With UAVs, it is possible to capture a series of high-resolution images capable of creating photogrammetric 3D models at a very low cost. Recently, I have undertaken two projects in Nevada that demonstrate the usefulness of UAV technology in Historic Archaeology. Using a UAV, I collected sequences of images from both Virginia City and Aurora, Nevada. Using photogrammetric software, the...
Underwater Geoarchaeology of Perennial Lakes in the Great Basin (2015)
Underwater archaeology in the Great Basin has been generally ignored because underwater researchers often do not associate this desert with inundated environments. Despite this misconception, many large lakes, marshlands, and rivers are found throughout the region. For instance, northern Nevada includes 168 sizable man-made perennial reservoirs that partially or completely cover 188 known sites. In addition, during the late Pleistocene large lakes of fluctuating size covered many of the valleys...
Urban Landscapes: Social, Cultural, and Ecological Heritage (2015)
Urban locations have an entire component of the landscape that is often overlooked, historic underground spaces. Not to be confused with the underground art and culture scene that occurs in a thriving, modern city; the historic underground can provide insight into a city’s past social, cultural, and ecological heritage. Because this particular part of the landscape is often neglected in anthropological research, there are not a lot of resources available to understand the historic uses of these...
Using Analytical Nodules to Assess the Integrity of Paleoindian Surface Lithic Scatters in Eastern Nevada (2016)
Minimum analytical nodule analysis is a useful tool for recognizing the variability present within a lithic assemblage. In turn, this type of analysis permits a more complete understanding of lithic technological organization. Typically, lithic analysts use macroscopic and microscopic characteristics, as well as spatial associations, to partition lithic assemblages into subgroups, or analytical nodules, that we assume reflect a limited set of production episodes or the role of a particular type...
Using Sourcing Studies to Examine Paleoindian Lithic Technological and Socioeconomic Organization in the Great Basin (2017)
In many regions of the world, archaeologists use sourcing studies to document patterns of toolstone procurement and conveyance that, in turn, inform their understanding of prehistoric lithic technological and socioeconomic organization. This is certainly true of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones’s research in eastern Nevada, where the sourcing of obsidian, andesite, and dacite artifacts has figured prominently in their study of Paleoindian lifeways. In this paper, I briefly reflect on Beck and...
Using the Lithic Technological Organization at Procurement Sites to Parse the Multiple Occurrences of Browns Bench Obsidian in Southern Idaho (2015)
Volcanic rocks such as obsidian were commonly used for the formation of chipped stone tools by people during prehistoric times. Archaeologists have been able to learn a great deal about the movements of prehistoric people by charting the procurement sites and use locations of these stones through x-ray fluorescence (XRF). Typically XRF can determine the procurement location of volcanic tool stone within a few square kilometers. Occasionally sources are characterized that are widely scattered and...
Volcanic Tableland Rock Art: Research and Management in the Western Great Basin (2015)
The Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, California has been the focus of significant previous research (e.g. Bettinger, Basgall, Giambastiani), which has been mobilized by proactive BLM Archaeologists (E. Levy, K. Halford, and G. Haverstock) to generate a predictive model for managing cultural sensitivity against recreational impacts. Further innovation has been the use of specialized rock art recorders (represented by Western Rock Art Research) to document the petroglyphs and petroglyphs of...
Western Message Petroglyphs: Esoterica in the Wild West (2015)
A particularly enigmatic form of rock art referred to as "Western Message Petroglyphs" has been identified at thirty locations in the American West scattered between no fewer than eight western states. Relying on standard rock art research approaches, this body of work is assigned to the historic mining boom years of the mid to late nineteenth century based on geographic distribution, symbol typology, and style analysis. A significant number of the sites are associated with the Mormon Trail and...
Western Stemmed Occupations of the Northern Great Basin (2017)
Recent research into the chronology and character of Western Stemmed Tradition occupations at the Paisley and Connley Caves provides new insight into the settlement-subsistence patterns and social organization of the period >13,000 to 9000 cal. BP. Human populations may have been larger, more social, and territorially constrained than previously envisioned. Long distance movement of obsidian artifacts across the landscape probably reflect brief population agglomerations (festivals) scheduled to...
What Can Hogup Cave Starches Tell Us about Diet That We don’t already Know? Context, Preservation, and the Comparison of Archaeobotanical Analyses. (2015)
Starches preserved on prehistoric artifacts including ceramics, ground stone and other lithic tools have assisted archaeologists in better understanding the relationships between technologies and food products, food processing, activity areas and tool function. However, little research has been done to identify differential starch preservation across these artifact types. In order to test whether starch preservation is uniform across tool types, and to examine whether starch records are...
When to defend? Optimal Territoriality across the Numic Homeland (2017)
Research exploring the complex human decisions that lead to territoriality have largely focused on defensibility. Here we explore territoriality using an ecological and evolutionary model from behavioral ecology: the marginal value theorem (MVT). Based on the principal of diminishing returns, the MVT predicts that the utility of a plot of land will decrease with each additional plot, therefore people should defend an area only at a threshold when it becomes energetically beneficial within the...
Where's the Party? An Investigation of Communal Feasting among the Fremont (2016)
The Fremont people were socially complex and lived within various sized communities. As with any community there are mechanisms used to either differentiate among members of the community or to integrate members of the community and beyond. One of these mechanisms is feasting. In this paper we present evidence from several large village sites across the Fremont region that suggests that the practice of feasting was utilized. In many cases, evidence for feasting is associated with structures that...
White Mountains Alpine Village Pattern (2015)
The alpine zone (above 10,000 feet) of White Mountains of eastern California is the most extensive, and by far the most intensively occupied by aboriginal groups, in the Great Basin. The earliest consistent use, beginning about 5500 BP, is by hunting parties. Beginning sometime after A.D. 600, the White Mountains village residential pattern is distinctive, featuring one or more well-built dwellings, well-developed middens, and extensive assemblages of chipped and ground stone. While hunting was...
Wild Plant Fiber Processing and Technological Organization: Holocene Perishable Artifact Production in the Bonneville Basin (2017)
Perishable artifact analysis in the Great Basin has often focused on whole or complete pieces to address questions regarding broad social groupings and environmental adaptation. In the Great Basin, past populations targeted distinct ecological zones to tend and gather wild plant species for the manufacture of perishable material culture, and by focusing on technological organization and the manufacturing process, there is great potential to better understand how these activities contributed to...
Wood Identification of Trees and Shrubs in the Great Basin and Snake River Plain (2015)
Charcoal identification is a crucial part of proper AMS dating archaeological sites, particularly in the Great Basin and Snake River Plain, where issues of old wood and root contamination can yield inaccurate dates. In addition to fuel, humans in the Great Basin and Snake River Plain have used wood from trees and large shrubs to construct spear and arrow shafts, bows, digging sticks, cradleboards, baskets, promontory pegs, and a variety of other artifacts. Wood identification is also...