North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough.

The Connley Caves site is composed of eight rockshelters situated in a south-facing ridge of welded tuff on the margin of Paulina Marsh in the Fort Rock Basin of central Oregon. Poor preservation of perishable materials and the removal of much of the Middle Holocene deposits at the site with a backhoe during archaeological excavations carried out in the 1960s limit our knowledge of this period at the Connley Caves. Recent excavations conducted by the University of Oregon uncovered a small alcove...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hall. Eric Bartelink. Julia Prince-Buitenhuys.

This study used stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to evaluate dietary variation among 30 adult individuals from a commingled assemblage recovered at Point San Jose (now Fort Mason), California (1863-1903). These remains comprise mostly middle-aged adults, both male and female, and two or more ancestral groups. The assemblage was recovered from a medical waste pit with evidence of anatomical dissection, suggesting that these individuals were likely of low socioeconomic status. Right...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Firenzi. Summer Hagerty. Charlie Goggin. Christopher Jazwa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine dietary change on northern Santa Rosa Island, California, at the mouth of Cañada Verde, the location of the historically documented village of Silimihi, the third-largest village on the island by baptisms. There is evidence of a human presence at this location from the middle Holocene (4560–4140 95% cal BP) through the period of Spanish contact....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Wienhold. Kelli Wathen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The work of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) requires methodical data collection, transcription, and dissemination of cultural resources. For much of the history of CRM, data collection methods have been purely analog, using paper forms and drawing maps resulting in an abundance of data that must be transcribed and digitized, taking extra time, money and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Doherty. Ted Goebel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic technological organization studies and geochemical analyses provide a useful way for archaeologists to examine prehistoric forager mobility. In the Great Basin, these methods, when applied to assemblages from multi-component sites, have revealed diachronic changes in lithic raw material procurement patterns between the Paleoindian and Early Archaic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Janes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent discovery of megalithic structures on the central coast of California was accomplished by geologic analysis of mounds and stone piles on the crest of Tomales Point in the Point Reyes National Seashore. These features were generally ignored by both geologists and archaeologists because at a distance they look like bedrock outcrops. However, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Knell. Erik Otárola-Castillo. Matthew Hill.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prior univariate and multivariate morphometric analysis of Paleoindian age Lake Mohave and Silver Lake projectile points from the Mojave Desert, California, revealed these types are distinguishable 80% of the time. Building on the prior study, we use landmark-based Geometric Morphometric (LGM) analyses and complementary non-LGM variables to assess whether...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Panich. Tsim Schneider.

This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of our broader efforts to document patterns of Native American residence in the nineteenth century, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. This paper trail begins with the first regional surveys conducted during the early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Leonard. Kendra Rodgers McGraw. Beniamino Volta.

While facility-wide cultural resource management at large DoD installations has increasingly been managed with GIS, many organizations have legacy information in the form of hard copy reports and non-searchable site files. In order to successfully fulfill legal and ethical responsibilities as long-term stewards of cultural resources on these installations, it is imperative that DoD staff make the incorporation of these legacy records into their enterprise GIS management framework a priority....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Bradley. Geoffrey Smith. Christopher Jazwa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Holocene component at Little Steamboat Point 1 (LSP-1) Rockshelter consists of flaked stone tools, debitage, ground stone, fire-affected rock, and abundant animal bones. It indicates suggest that people systematically butchered ~1,000 rabbits and hares, constructed cooking features, occasionally processed plants, and manufactured and discarded stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Cole. Jack Broughton. Lauren Hainsworth. Maren Moffatt. Alex Shumate.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in large-game hunting has long been viewed as a primary driver influencing many aspects of change in human behavior and biology worldwide. In western North America, variation in Holocene artiodactyl (e.g., bison, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep) hunting has often been examined from a behavioral ecological perspective to understand past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Magargal.

Cooking food conferred an energetic advantage to our pre-human ancestors and became one of the hallmark characteristics of the human strategy set. Accessing fuel remains a common problem for many human societies. Yet anthropologists do not often take the costs of gathering fuel into account when modeling subsistence and settlement. This paper presents a model that incorporates firewood tradeoffs into human choices about what to eat and where to live, and examines a hypothetical case for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Escee Lopez. Santos Cisceneros. Shelby Medina. Jessica Morales. Rene Vellanoweth.

Native peoples of Southern California developed complex systems of trades through non-monetary exchanges of items such as beads. Through these exchanges and interactions, socioeconomic structures within intra-local and extra-local communities evolved to fit individual governing societies. The Tule Creek Village was the epicenter of cultural and social development during the Late Holocene on San Nicolas Island. It harbored a myriad bead types distributed among the residential and ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina McDonough.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In March 2022, the site of an early twentieth-century blacksmith shop on my family’s 90-acre sheep ranch in Montour Valley of southwestern Idaho was excavated due to dilapidation and subsequent collapse of the structure. In the early twentieth century, the valley was the site of intensive agriculture and ranching, and the establishment of the railroad in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Lupo. David Schmitt.

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological applications of the Prey Choice Model (PCM) are often based on the assumption that prey body-size is a robust proxy for prey rank and post-encounter return rate. In zooarchaeological assemblages, co-variation in the abundances of large and small-sized prey are often viewed as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Mohlenhoff.

Many questions surround trends in prehistoric fisheries dynamics and fish use along the Pacific Coast of North America. Marine fish are particularly sensitive to changes in their environment, including variation in sea surface temperature that changes cyclically with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Trans-Holocene paleontological or archaeological sites with large faunal assemblages are the ideal tool for use in reconstructing these paleoenvironmental records. Here, I report preliminary data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cahill Shpall. Katelyn McDonough. Dennis Jenkins.

Consistent Elko chronology in the Northern Great Basin remains elusive to the archeological community. Numerous symptoms can be determined to be the cause of this absence of information, including a lack of in depth analysis in the region, extensive sediment disturbance leading to non-conclusive stratigraphic dating where studies have taken place, and a shortage of differential site comparisons. Connelly Caves provides an amazing opportunity to combat this archeological affliction through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Joey LaValley.

While Great Basin archaeologists use projectile points as time-sensitive markers, these typologies are based on the morphological characteristics of the finished artifacts. In most cases, points were produced elsewhere and curated to their final destination or they are found within a palimpsest containing a mixed bag of flaked stone tools and debitage. Seldom are archaeologists able to analyze debitage specific to the production of points. In 2016, Logan Simpson archaeologists recorded a small...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Bertman.

This is an abstract from the "Expanding Our Understanding of the Mojave Desert: Emerging Research and New Perspectives on Old Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over 40 years, the orphaned archaeological collections excavated by Antelope Valley College (AVC) have remained underutilized and underreported—an untapped resource and oversight to archaeological investigations in the western Mojave Desert. Orphaned collections can be revisited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Desiree Martinez.

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. For the past thirty years, Tongva leaders and cultural educators have created educational programs with local scholars in order to rectify the belief that the Tongva are extinct. In some instances, these programs were the result of irate letters from and protests by Tongva community members when exhibits, tours, interpretive signs,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Bettinger.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environment and technology are the independent “givens” of Julian Steward’s model of cultural ecology wherein different techno-environmental combinations favor different subsistence, settlement, and organizational responses....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Sink.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations in Joshua Tree National Park, a history of arbitrary and inconsistent nomenclature for lithic materials has precluded any sort of landscape-level assemblage comparisons. To address this, I have assembled a dense catalog of all visually-distinct lithic raw materials and their relative frequencies at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig T. Goralski.

In 2001, California passed SB 297, which mandated that coroners "shall collect samples for DNA testing from the remains of all unidentified persons and shall send those samples to the Department of Justice for DNA testing and inclusion in the DNA data bank." This legislation, which was largely unfunded by the state, expanded existing DNA testing programs to include remains from cold cases that were being stored by state agencies and remains that had been interred in cemeteries throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Salinan Tribe occupied territory extending from the California’s Salinas Valley across the Santa Lucia/Central Coast Ranges to the Pacific coast. Although poorly known, they created a small but important corpus of rock paintings. Even less well-known is the ethnographic record on these pictographs. This includes a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Elston. Gloria Brown. Ryan Bradshaw. Martijn Kuypers. David Zeanah.

Current views of the Prearchaic draw heavily from investigations of sites near pluvial lakes in the eastern and western Great Basin. The record from the Central Great Basin remains impoverished, largely due to the limited number of stratified archaeological sites containing well preserved material suitable for faunal analysis and radiocarbon dating. Recent investigations of an open-air site (26La4434) along the northern shore of Pleistocene Lake Gilbert in Grass Valley, revealed a buried deposit...