North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Bradley. Geoffrey Smith. Kenneth Nussear.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Great Basin underwent considerable environmental change during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition, such as lower precipitation, increased temperatures, and the diminishment of lakes and wetlands. Archaeologists have long hypothesized that people responded by altering their settlement-subsistence strategies. Some models outlining these responses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Binning. Jennifer Thatcher. Craig Skinner.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a cultural resource to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, it must meet specific criteria. For significant archaeological sites, this usually means the resources can produce data that address important questions about the past (i.e., National Register Criterion D). The integrity of design is of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Wardle.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The configuration of the various elements of a river system can have significant impacts on the availability, abundance, and nutritional profitability of aquatic organisms utilized as food by groups of human foragers. These factors may have influenced where and when Late Archaic foragers decided to fish along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Davis. Lucas Martindale Johnson. Elsa Carpenter. Lee Drake. Daron Duke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to push the limits of nondestructive X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis in efforts to geochemically source small obsidian artifacts. Building on numerous prior investigations, this study examines a statistically large sample of unmodified obsidian flakes to better define the size threshold for acceptable precision and accuracy and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick O'Grady. Scott Thomas. Thomas Stafford, Jr.. Daniel Stueber. Margaret Helzer.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2018 fieldwork emphasized trench excavation across the relict stream channel directly in front of the rockshelter. Sedimentary deposits comprise a well-stratified, five-part sequence of bedrock basalt overlain by a gravel bed of rounded cobbles and boulders; dark gray blocky to massive cienega...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Musser-Lopez.

Though routine interaction may not have been the case, the Fremont were a part of the iconic world of the Virgin (Anasazi) Puebloan people who occupied southeastern Nevada north of Las Vegas in Evergreen Flats, 75 miles northwest the Lower Colorado River’s north end bend. Within that region is Petroglyph Corral visually demonstrating Puebloan people at a Fremont fringe area where the two cultures may have competed, collided or even collapsed into one another and the more recent Numic tribes. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Puckett.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The high desert basin surrounding Walker Lake, Nevada, has been subject to multiple landscape shifts since the lake reached its Late Pleistocene highstand, 15,679 cal BP. Research has identified at least four lake transgression and regression events postdating 5000 BP, and after its nineteenth-century historic highstand, the lake has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Clauss.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reflecting on work within a Serrano community and their ancestral territory, in this presentation, I will discuss how community-based conceptions of self and landscape, cultural mores related to the treatment of ancestors and artifacts, and the application of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Medina. Jessica Rodriguez. Paul Gerard. René Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Danielson Ranch (CA-VEN-395) is a multi-component site containing both significant prehistoric shell midden deposits and a historical ranch complex. CA-VEN-395 consists of five discrete loci dated to between 2690 and 860 cal BP, with the most recent occupation as late as 290-60 cal BP. Excavation revealed vertebrate faunal remains representing specimens from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Erlandson.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleocoastal sites on California's Northern Channel Islands have produced hundreds of stemmed points, crescents, foliate points or knives, and other bifaces dated between ~12,250 and 8200 years ago. Although uniquely maritime in nature, these island Paleocoastal assemblages are clearly related to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Reaux.

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. Source provenance analyses have long featured prominently in Great Basin Paleoindian archaeology. Such research has primarily focused on reconstructing Paleoindian settlement/subsistence strategies, territoriality, and socioeconomic interactions by sourcing obsidian artifacts from sites and mapping their geographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Smith. Derek Reaux.

Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points mark Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene occupations in the Great Basin. Considerable morphological variability exists among WST points and over the years researchers have come to recognize various types (e.g., Cougar Mountain, Haskett, Parman, and Windust). Because most substantial WST sites are near-surface scatters that likely represent palimpsests of multiple occupations, it remains unclear whether this variability reflects tools used during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Rosencrance.

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. There is compelling evidence that people throughout the Americas adapted to the cold Younger Dryas winters by manufacturing tight-fitting, sewn clothing. Ethnographic observations of Arctic peoples indicate that they harvested hide animals and manufactured clothing during residential aggregation events in the fall....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fanya Becks.

As archaeologists in Central California shift towards understanding indigenous agencies within the indigenous landscapes of colonial contact (Panich and Schneider 2015) an opportunity has arrived for the field to consider the practical implications of autochthonous Central Californian relationships and ontological perspectives for research praxis. The question posed in this paper, is what are rocks as interlocutors in relationships; how do you think of a rock when it is a part of a place that is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Parker. Lisa Johnson. Kate Magargal. Marianna Di Paolo. Brian Codding.

The (re)introduction of the horse to North America brought dramatic changes to American Indians. However, not all populations were affected equally; the horse became central to some societies, but had seemingly little effect on others. This variation is seen across Great Basin ethnographic groups, where some populations adopted the horse for transportation and hunting, while others ignored or even ate the horse. Some argue that this variation is the result of environmental constraints: where the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Lucido. Scott Lydon.

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The triple consciousness that is the Afro-Mestiza or Mestizo experience conjures nationalism, racialization, and ethnicity and thereby, the ongoing negotiation of identity on the Spanish and Mexican borderlands frontier. Where archaeology and historical studies are concerned, the effort to interrogate the lives of mestiza women within such contested landscapes is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan McGuinness.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Intermountain West there is mounting evidence that some Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points are as old, if not older, than Clovis points on the Plains and in the Southwest. Given this, the distribution of WST points may hold the key to understanding how people initially populated the Far West. I use WST point and site location data in Lake County,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Santarone. William Eckerle. Katherine Puseman. Kenneth Cannon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site 26EK16689 is a multiple component open archaeological site near West Wendover, Nevada, approximately three miles from Danger Cave. Despite a history of inundation, ground disturbance, and generally rough treatment, excavations have shown that site 26EK16689 preserves extensive and intact cultural deposits with good organic preservation. In addition,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Farrell. Nancy Ukai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eighty years ago, James Wakasa was shot and killed while walking his dog in the Utah desert. Wakasa was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II because of their ethnicity; he had been imprisoned at the Topaz Relocation Center and his killer was a Military Police guard. In a finding that would sound all too familiar even today, an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Al Schwitalla. Marin Pilloud. Terry Jones.

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Participation of females in inter-group combat is well-attested in the historic and ethnographic record of central California, but is often overlooked and/or trivialized in contemporary archaeological research. Drawing from the Central California Bioarchaeological Database (CCBD) that includes information on more than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Greenwald.

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. Population growth during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA) (1100–600 BP) and into the Late period (~600–180 BP) in Central California drove increased intensification and reliance on low-ranking, low-risk food sources, primarily acorn and small seeds inland, and shellfish and small schooling fish on the bay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Escee Lopez. Jessica Morales. Rene Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence from the California Channel Islands has provided insight on the important role fish played in daily human subsistence practices. San Nicolas Island is home to a rich and diverse marine environment containing the largest kelp forest along the Southern California Bight. This study focuses on fish data from a middle to late Holocene...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Sanchez.

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. Recent indigenous, eco-archaeological, and low-impact field research on the Central California Coast resulted in the excavation of four sites that were inhabited from the mid-Holocene to the contact period. Vertebrate remains from these sites were sampled using fine-grained recovery methods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Bruck. Todd J. Braje. Torben C. Rick. Emma Elliott Smith. Lain Graham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the southern California coast, Point Conception is highly significant for Chumash peoples and demarcates a critical location of ecological diversity. At this location, the coastline abruptly shifts from a north-south to east-west trending shoreline and marks the ecological convergence of colder northern and warmer southern waters, a biogeographic...