North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (452 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As California wildfires increase in intensity and frequency across the state, archaeologists and land managers work to update fire management strategies and reassess fire risks to sensitive cultural resources. Existing literature indicates that while some buried archaeological resources are fairly protected, rock art sites are particularly susceptible to...
Fire Lookout Viewsheds in the Malheur National Forest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire lookout towers are early 20th century structures built by the U.S. Forest Service for the purpose of early wildfire detection. As the Forest Service moves away from staffing fire lookout towers, some call for the decommissioning and tearing down these structures, including within the Malheur National Forest. However, these historic towers still serve...
The First Centuries after Clovis: A Review of Younger Dryas Western Stemmed Tradition Occupations in the Great Basin with a Focus on What They Can Tell Us about How and When Humans Colonized the Western United States (2019)
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. In recent years the number of researchers who argue that the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) marks the descendants of colonizing populations who traveled along the Pacific Coast before moving inland has increased. The Paisley Caves and Cooper’s Ferry sites have provided compelling evidence that groups in...
A First Look at Western Stemmed Tradition Lithic Reduction and Procurement Strategies at Connley Cave 4, Oregon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western Stemmed Tradition lithic assemblages are typically small at buried, Younger-Dryas aged sites throughout the Great Basin. Recent work at the Connley Caves, in the Fort Rock Basin of south-central Oregon, has uncovered a rich cultural assemblage containing projectile points, scrapers, flake tools, cores, abraders, gravers, and thousands of lithic...
Fish, Fishing, and Ecological Resilience along the Big Sur Coast of California (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Along the Big Sur coastline, the Salinan and Esselen relied on a relatively consistent repertoire of small and medium-bodied fish species for at least 6,000 years. Decades of systematic excavations have identified the importance of fish, although we are still gathering data on temporal and...
Fishing Features in the Mojave Desert and Beyond: Implications at Ivanpah Dry Lake, NV (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mojave Desert is a host of many now desiccated Holocene lakes. Fishing features are rare along these lakeshores, but they do occur. Recent investigations at Ivanpah Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert along the California/Nevada border have revealed a complex of fishing features including fishing platforms and fishing circles, connecting this area to the...
The Fluted Point Component of the Old River Bed Delta, Utah (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster contextualizes archaeological sites with fluted point components and related finds on the Old River Bed (ORB) delta in western Utah. Between ~13,000 and 9500 cal BP the ORB delta endured as a large distributary-fed wetland in what is now the dry and forbidding Great Salt Lake Desert. This vast wetland is widely recognized for its Western...
Food Residue Analysis on Soapstone Cooking Vessels in the Chumash Homeland: Implications for Changing Foodway Patterns during the Mission Period across the Colonial Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the results of pollen, phytolith, starch, and organic residue (FTIR) analyses conducted on soapstone cooking vessels in museum collections uncovered in the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas, California. The vessels were excavated from distinct chronological and spatial contexts in the Chumash homeland: a pre-Mission period site...
A Forensic investigation of the Ralph Glidden Human Remains Collection of the Catalina Island Museum (2018)
Members of the Gabrielino/Tongva community always felt that the Ralph Glidden Collection within the Catalina Island museum required a forensic style of investigation. Although they may have been discussing the entire collection, it is definitely applies to the human remains collections. The Catalina Island Museum human remains collection that was recently repatriated had received limited analysis. A few scholars incorporated the collection into larger discussions about the Gabrielino and Chumash...
Fremont Fishing: New Data from Recent Excavations in Utah Valley (2018)
The Utah Valley, with easy access to montane, lacustrine, and riverine resources, is the location of some of the largest known Fremont habitation sites. Two of these sites have recently been excavated resulting in a wealth of new data. While many aspects of Fremont diet have been explored in depth, the role of fishing is often understudied due to poor preservation of fish remains and fishing tools. In this poster we report the analysis of the fish bones and the recovery and analysis of bone and...
Fremont Maize Cultivation and Latest Holocene Climate Variability in the Cub Creek Archaeological District, Dinosaur National Monument (2018)
The Cub Creek Archaeological District in northern Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument was an early center of Fremont maize cultivation and village settlement AD 450-850. Cub Creek lies near the northern limit of maize cultivation in western North America in the foothills of the Uinta Mountain Range. We couple a Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon-dated pithouses and roasting features with a 2,115-year tree-ring reconstruction of August-July precipitation to explore relationships between Fremont...
From Features to Figures: Quantitative Analysis of California Native American Baskets (2018)
There are only a few recognized experts on California Native American basketry and their informed opinions establish the current state of knowledge. It takes years of experience under the guidance of a knowledgeable mentor and examination of hundreds of baskets to develop such expertise. While analysis by the few experts may be quantitative, scientific, and exacting, designation of a basket’s ethnic identification continues to be subjective. In some instances, authors cite little but their own...
From Food of the Gods to Avocado Toast: Bringing the Mesoamerican Avocado to California in the Nineteenth Century (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The earliest avocados of the Americas were so prized by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec peoples for their rich caloric content and buttery flavor that they were portrayed in iconography on king’s tombs and used as place names for ancient cities. During the colonial period, the Spanish used the fruit as food for enslaved people on sugar plantations across their...
From Shore to Mountain: Insights into Resource Selection and Processing along the Central California Coast (2018)
Salvage excavations conducted in the 1970s at the Red, White, and Blue Beach site (CA-SCR-35), located in northern Santa Cruz County on the central California coast on Monterey Bay, recovered a large and diverse vertebrate faunal assemblage with a well-defined Middle Period (2800–900 cal BP) component. Few faunal assemblages from this area of the Central Coast have been thoroughly analyzed and little is known about resource selection and processing during this time. I use archaeofaunal data from...
Front-Loading Backfilling: Site Stabilization of a Cliffside Shell Midden at l’akayamu (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present the design of a sampling project at one of the three archaeological sites composing the Late/Historic village of l’akayamu on limuw (Santa Cruz Island, California). We developed our methods with two goals: first, to support effective site stabilization post-excavation; second, to recover fragile artifacts eroding from a sea cliff while...
The Future of Archaeological Research on Public Lands: A Case Study from California (2018)
Lynne Goldstein has been on the front lines in developing innovative field programs for the study of diverse places in North America.This paper examines her influence on archaeological investigations undertaken at the Russian colony of Ross in northern California. A significant trend in the study of sites on public lands is the shift from broad-scale, high-impact excavations to low-impact field practices. The paper outlines her legacy in the development of coordinated research programs that...
Gendered Grave Goods: Relationships between Gender-Associated Artifacts and Biological Sex in the Precontact San Francisco Bay Area (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Work by Chronicle Heritage" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Too often the identified biological sex of precontact human remains are assumed to represent the lived gender experience of the individual. At the same time, concepts of the gendered division of labor influence the association of classes of artifacts with genders. This paper reexamines data from excavations of burials in the San Francisco...
Geoarchaeological Insights from a Late Pleistocene–Terminal Holocene Site on Isla Cedros, Baja California (2021)
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. Current geoarchaeological investigations of the Cerro Pedrogoso (Rocky Hill) site on Isla Cedros, Baja California, seek to provide a context for a Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation along the Pacific coast. Here, a rich assemblage of artifacts signals the presence of maritime coastal adaptations from at...
The Geoarchaeology of Playa-Dune Complexes on Edwards Air Force Base (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists working in the western Mojave Desert have long assumed that sediments in the region contain limited depth. The playas that dot the landscape are often assumed to have formed at the end of the Pleistocene, with playas having no stratigraphy and no buried cultural deposits. In the Antelope Valley, the dunes that are present are thought to be...
A Geochemical Analysis of Concave Base and Western Stemmed Tradition Projectile Points in Southeastern Oregon (2018)
The relationship between concave base and Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points in the Great Basin is not well-understood. They may represent sequential Late Pleistocene technologies, coeval technologies used by different ethnolinguistic populations, or different components within the same toolkits. To explore the latter possibility, I collected geochemical sourcing data for both types of artifacts recovered from three adjacent valleys in southeastern Oregon: (1) Warner Valley; (2)...
Geochemical Analysis of Felsite Quarries at Pluvial Lake Mojave (2024)
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. This study geochemically documents the conveyance of felsite from quarries in the Soda Mountains adjacent to pluvial Lake Mojave, California to the archaeological sites along its terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene (TP/EH) shorelines. Prior research suggests Paleoindians conveyed tool...
Geographic Distribution Analysis of Elko Series Projectile Points Across the Great Basin (2018)
The Elko projectile point series is diagnostic of the early Archaic period throughout the Great Basin. Within the Elko series, two identified subtypes exist: Elko Eared (EE) and Elko Corner-notched (ECN). While morphologically distinct, both subtypes occur within the same chronological and geographic extents. In this study, I gathered a sample of 37 sites throughout the Great Basin with identified EE and/or ECN points, then developed an index representing the proportion of EE to ECN points in...
Geological Knowledge, CRM, and the Lithic Cultural Landscape of Eastern Oregon (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the impressive buttes and craters where it can be quarried to the shining black flakes speckled across vast sagebrush plains, obsidian and its procurement, use, and discard has defined the human experience of eastern Oregon’s landscape since time immemorial. Cultural resource management (CRM) practitioners must be proactive about documenting the...
Geophyte Exploitation in Northern Great Basin: Starch Granule Analysis of Bedrock Metates in Warner Valley, Oregon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophytes store starch in underground organs considered highly valued food resources across many human societies. For example, Indigenous people in the northern Great Basin plan social activities around the seasonal...
Geospatial Analyses of Site Distributions at Ivanpah Dry Lake (2024)
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. Ivanpah Dry Lake is an overlooked Holocene and paleolake located in the eastern Mojave Desert. Much of the archaeological work done in the area has centered around industry and development with data available in gray literature site reports and records. This research is a component of...