North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Guzman.

Mapping Prehistoric Behavior Patterns at a Lithic Tool Stone Source in the Colorado Desert: Results of Geospatial Analysis at CA-IMP-008/H This paper sets out results obtained following a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of the spatial patterning of stone tools at a study area in the Colorado Desert of southern California. Stone tools are examined based on their utility for an explanation of their use and importance in the lives of prehistoric foragers. Current efforts to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Stone. Loren Davis.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in technology such as 3D digital scanning and spatial analysis software have provided archaeologists with novel data. Specifically, these methods increase the researcher’s ability to measure artifact morphology and past networks of cultural transmission, to potentially track the movement of past peoples and ideas through space and time....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Merrill. Dwight Read.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to recent literature, correspondence analysis is the method of choice for frequency seriation. However, this does not consider the effects of data heterogeneity or typology on the orderings produced by this method. This relates to a more fundamental issue of how to evaluate the effects of heterogeneity and typology on seriation results, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Holcomb. Lisa-Marie Shillito. Alicia Sawyer. Karl Wegmann. Panagiotis Karkanas.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Younger Dryas Chronozone (YDC) is a cooling event occurring 12,900–11,600 years ago (cal BP) marked by rapid changes in plant and animal communities, subsequently affecting late Pleistocene human population organization and settlement dynamics across the globe. In North America’s Northern Great Basin, these changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hylkema.

This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A group of Middle Holocene aged archaeological sites along the Santa Cruz County Coast have produced a large number of chert and obsidian projectile points. Sites SCR-3, SCR-7, SCR-10 and SCR-40 have the same range of point types and materials, and are all within 10 miles radius of each other. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurie Burgess. William Billeck. Torben Rick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass beads were an important trade item and symbol of culture contact for Native Americans in coastal California and the Channel Islands where people had manufactured shell and stone beads for some 10,000 years. Glass bead assemblages from the northern Channel Islands, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and San Miguel, all entered the collections of the Smithsonian’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Knell. Matthew Kirby. Jan Taylor. Albert Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fluctuations in the extent and productivity of wetland habitat influenced Great Basin Paleoindian land use strategies. Paleoindians responded to resource fluctuations using a “wetland transient” strategy represented by frequent moves between pluvial lakes, or a “wetland stable” strategy characterized by comparatively long stays at resource hotspots. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alaina Wibberly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The settler colonial history of the Mojave Desert may be defined less by its expansion and more by its various failures and withdrawals. Drawing on a dataset of historic refuse sites that spans two centuries and three million acres, this paper uses spatial modeling to map the landscape’s trajectory toward waste-land. The trash dumps and mining ruins that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Carlson. Christopher Beckham. Caleb Chen. Peiqi Zhang.

This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. California archaeology and ethnography record instances of mortars made from wood, as well as stone. Differences in raw material availability, intended uses, and mobility are major factors that could contribute to preferential manufacture of wooden mortars versus similarly shaped stone mortars. Although...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Burns.

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotopic evidence suggests use of shell bead money in central California developed during a time of high environmental uncertainty and decreasing social trust. Monetized exchange likely played a role in risk mitigation while maintaining independence of small groups. As a utility maximizing form of sharing, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tsim Schneider. GeorgeAnn DeAntoni. Gregg Castro.

This is an abstract from the "Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past two decades of archaeology in California have produced several examples of successful indigenous and community-based research. There are still other examples of a lingering tension between archaeologists and tribes as the agendas of western science and indigenous epistemologies grate against one another. This current climate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alina Tichinin.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multiple archaeometric techniques were used to inform on prey acquisition in the Archaic to Terminal Prehistoric periods (1450–4700 cal BP) in the northwestern Great Basin. Stable isotope analysis, cementum increment analysis, and AMS radiocarbon dating were performed on artiodactyl teeth excavated from Paiute Creek Shelter (PCS) in Nevada’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Savannah Bommarito. Andrea Brunelle. Simon Brewer. Isaac Hart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pollen from cave sediments within Hogup Cave and pollen and macroscopic charcoal found in a nearby 268 cm sediment core were analyzed and used as proxies to reconstruct the paleoecological and anthropogenic record of Hogup Cave and the surrounding region, found in the West Desert of Utah. The relationship between Paleoindians and their use of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isaac Hart. Andrea Brunelle. Jennifer DeGraffenried. Daron Duke. D. Craig Young.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present a novel approach to developing a unified radiocarbon-based chronology for multiple sediment cores from a location where radiocarbon dating is challenging. We used 36 radiocarbon ages from eight terminal Pleistocene and Holocene sediment cores with correlated stratigraphies. Stratigraphic correlation was accomplished using a combination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blong. Helen Whelton. Lisa-Marie Shillito. Ian Bull. Dennis Jenkins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human coprolites from archaeological contexts can provide valuable information about human health, dietary practices, and land-use patterns. Traditional coprolites studies have focused on identifying animal macrofossils and plant macrofossils and microfossils, but more recent research has shown the utility of biomolecular research (e.g., lipids, aDNA) for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Larson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women archaeologists approach their work from the influences of their gender and life experiences, using their skills and knowledge in archaeology. In 2018 seven women archaeologists were interviewed by the author and were asked five questions about the role of gender in their work. Only one of them was Native American Indian, and she discussed obstacles and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Doherty.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the recent reporting of pre-Clovis-aged Western Stemmed components at archaeological sites in the Great Basin, there is renewed interest in the previously excavated Paleoindian assemblage from Smith Creek Cave. There, a stemmed-point component was originally dated to approximately 13,000 years ago. A thorough...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Curry. Heather Atherton. Scott Baxter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Brought to California’s Central Valley by the opportunity to mine for gold and the construction of the railroad, Chinese immigrants created a fast-growing and prosperous Chinatown in Fresno. So infamous was this neighborhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that journalist and researcher Schyler Rehart stated "[t]he Chinese gambling dens of West...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Cox. Valerie Sgheiza.

The Point San Jose skeletal collection was excavated from a 19th century medical waste deposit. Remains within the deposit were completely commingled and highly fragmented. As re-association was highly unlikely, careful assessment of the commingled nature of the collection was required. To establish the Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) represented in the collection, two approaches were used: Max (L,R) and an age-informed MNI. The maximum count per unique element resulted in an MNI of 22...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlyn Bailey. Jacob Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone fat has been recognized by prehistoric and modern societies as an important source of lipids and other nutrients. Experimental and ethnoarchaeological research have provided a number of archaeological correlates for identifying the role that such nutritional resources were exploited by prehistoric peoples. To date, the bulk of such research has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Whelan.

Geochemical sourcing of lithic artifacts has proven to be a useful analytical tool for the studies of trade and mobility in the archaeological record. However, it is difficult to distinguish lithic material acquired through exchange from material acquired directly from the source. Economic models of lithic reduction suggest that material procured for the purpose of exchange may be treated differently than material procured for personal consumption. I compare obsidian source profiles and lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Gamble.

The Chumash Indians of southern California made and used beads of stone, bone, and a variety of species of shell for over 8,000 years. A noted shift in shell beads occurred about 800 years ago with the appearance of a new bead type, cupped beads, made from the thick callus of the Callianax biplicata, a portion of the shell that had previously not been used. These types of beads were common throughout the Chumash region and elsewhere during the Late period and have been identified as money beads...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Banke. Christopher Jazwa. Jennifer Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we synthesize the body of previous and continuing research of chert quarries on the East End and Isthmus of Santa Cruz Island, CA since 1985. Santa Cruz Island chert quarries have been integral to interpretations of craft specialization, the development of social complexity, and material conveyance among peoples on the Northern Channel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josephine McDonald.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lincoln County Rock Art Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) Inventory Project in Nevada focused on the rock art from the Mount Irish, Shooting Gallery and Pahroc ACECs. All three of these areas form part of a distinctive style region within the Great Basin. This is defined by the presence of the Patterned Bodied and Solid Bodied Figures which were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Adams. Danny Mullins.

Within west central Utah, site locations dating to the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) are generally associated with specific geographical features; such as, the Old River Bed (ORB), inverted stream beds/channels, and the barren playas of the Great Salt Lake Desert (Dugway). Over decades of cultural resource management inventories, numerous PHT-aged archaeological sites have been identified along the maximum extent, and subsequent shorelines and resulting feeder streams, of receding Lake...