North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (452 Records)
Desert environments pose challenging conditions to human travel in the form of exposure to intense weather and access to important water sources. Environmental constraints of the desert can explain people’s decisions to consider energy-efficient modes of travel through the framework of Human Behavioral Ecology. Culture, however, does not always follow the model of Human Behavioral Ecology, even in environments posing challenges that require efficient ways of living. Cultural knowledge, beliefs,...
The Gordian Knot: Novel Methods for Digitally Identifying, Defining, and Separating Unique Rock Art Elements (2018)
In rock art research the stratigraphy of a rock art panel can offer great insight into the temporality of a panel, which can then inform many other aspects of analytical inquiry. Yet, making the necessary distinctions between elements is often difficult--as images fade and are worn by time, or the subjective nuances of the recorder. This paper explores novel means of identifying, defining, and separating unique rock art elements in digital space within different digital methodologies.
Habitat-Specific Marine Reservoir Corrections along the Central California Coast: The Effects of Differential Upwelling (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A confluence of natural factors has created three different ecological habitats for marine shellfish with potentially unique marine reservoir offsets along the central California coast. Deep-water trenches adjacent to the rocky points (e.g., Arguello, Conception, Sal), create localized upwelling environments. Reported offsets range from 400-1000 years for...
Hard Questions for Hardrock Places: Integrating Academic-Based Research Questions into the Management of Hardrock Mining Sites on Public Lands in the Southern California Deserts (2018)
Land-managing agencies have to make tough decisions about what archaeological sites are worth conserving – decisions that are getting tougher as the capacity of agencies continues to be stretched. Academics may disagree with these decisions, yet their approaches to research have long been crucial to defining what is significant. The Bureau of Land Management California (with Statistical Research, Inc.) has recently completed a comprehensive management program for hardrock mining sites on 10+...
Harvesting Seagrass 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. This project is a collaborative effort driven by a multi-tribal Chumash community to reawaken cultural knowledge while simultaneously generating new archaeological data about the well-preserved Chumash village of l’akayamu. Located on limuw (Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California’s Channel Islands), l’akayamu is a historical village that was...
Haskett and its Clovis Parallels (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. Haskett represents an initiating point style in some parts of western North America. Radiocarbon dates suggest the earliest Haskett occupations were within the Clovis era, and Haskett shares several technological and geographic attributes that are more in kind with Clovis than with later stemmed styles....
Haskett Chronology and Its Relationship to Other North American Technocomplexes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Haskett projectile points are well known in the Great Basin, but until recently their precise age has been considered poorly understood. Outside of the Great Basin, few researchers know of Haskett or consider it an important facet of the late Pleistocene cultural landscape. Archaeologists...
Haskett: What Is It, When Is It, Where Is It? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Haskett projectile points were first defined in Idaho by Robert Butler in 1965 and have since figured variously into discussions of non-fluted lanceolate technology from the terminal Pleistocene. As one of a series of similar styles known by other names found along the western cordillera of...
Hasketts and Crescents: An Analysis of the Lithic Tools from Weed Lake Ditch, Oregon (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. Several open-air sites with buried stemmed point technology have been discovered in the Harney Basin, southeastern Oregon. These sites provide a unique way to expand our current understanding of Western Stemmed lithic technology and subsistence practices from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. The research presented...
Health and Healthcare Management in a California Black Town (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the dissolution of the Reconstruction Era, black Americans were faced with the legislative and social constraints of the Jim Crow Era. These limitations on life spurred a call to action to create black settlements free of white supremacy and anti-black sentiments, such as the settlement of Allensworth. The town of Allensworth, located in Tulare County of...
High Altitude Settlement as Evolutionary Process (2018)
The peopling of high altitudes and altitude’s ecological analog, high latitude, are critical to understanding worldwide human dispersals and the diversity of human adaptation but are still quite poorly understood. Within this context, this paper presents a model for the initiation, establishment, and maintenance of permanent high altitude settlements, especially in middle latitudes. This model takes into account the limiting factors found in such settings, the costs and benefits of different...
High-Altitude Settlement as Evolutionary Process in Mid-Latitude North and South America (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite many similarities, aboriginal high-altitude occupations in the middle latitudes of North and South America differ in several ways. This paper compares and contrasts the behaviors that have been reconstructed in these locales and explores the principal drivers of high-altitude intensification—population pressure, climate change, and social...
The Honda Ridge Pilot Project: Microscopy and Stratigraphy at the Honda Ridge Rock Art Site, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California (2018)
The Honda Ridge pictograph panel contains highly stratified elements painted on a smooth, reflective surface, offering a unique opportunity to explore prehistoric rock art production. We adapted non-invasive, digital microscopy methods from the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center to apply stratigraphic analysis within a 1m x 1m section of this superimposed, monochromatic panel. The reflective host rock preserves observable characteristics of prehistoric painting techniques, from...
Hot Spots of Cobblestone Tool Reduction Incidents and Potential Chronological Staging of the Technology along California's Lower Colorado River Shorelines (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spatial autocorrelation software for the Moran I statistic in ArcGIS v10.6 was used to combine archaeological site location data with “intensity” or weight defined by the number of artifacts in each of the 280 loci contained within an 80-acre portion of CA-SBr-1456 along the California side of the Lower Colorado River. That data was then processed to...
Household Craft Production at San Gabriel Mission, California (2024)
This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over a decade of research, archaeologists working at San Gabriel Mission (active from 1771 to 1834) explored contexts outside of the mission quadrangle that revealed evidence of the numerous ways in which native residents navigated their colonial world,...
How to Avoid Getting Stuck: Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Anarchy in Southern California (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial California was home to some of the highest degrees of linguistic and cultural diversity seen in human history. This rich variability provides an excellent example for scholars to compare historical trajectories to understand how different societies developed along different...
Human Adaptation to Middle Holocene Aridity in the Northwestern Great Basin: Coprolites and Season of Occupation at the Paisley Caves, Oregon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The middle Holocene (9000–6000 cal BP) in the northwestern Great Basin is marked by warmer and drier conditions resulting in significant ecological change. There is archaeological evidence for population decline, highly mobile groups occupying temporary camps, and a focus on seasonally productive resources. Most sites are located on dunes or lake margins...
Human Adaptations to Environmental Change on the California Channel Islands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides an overview of human adaptations to environmental change during 13,000 years of human occupation on the California Channel Islands. In particular, I consider how the range of economically important species shifted with changing environmental conditions and how different foraging...
Humanizing Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teresita Majewski has influenced archaeology and heritage management in extensive and diverse ways. To my mind, her contributions all have one idea in common: humanizing the field. Here I present three examples of her influence on my own work, especially regarding ceramic analysis and work with stakeholders, research partners, and...
Hunter-Gatherer Intensification and Long-Term Demography: A SW Wyoming Case Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intensification of production by human groups has occurred at various times around the globe. Intensification correlates with increases in population size, increased labor investment in food production, and decreased residential mobility; the opposite (de-intensification) correlates with decreases in population size, decreased labor investments in food...
Hunters, Soldiers, and Holy Men: Exploring the Gendered Politics of Mission Landscapes in Alta California (2018)
Space was paramount to Spanish missionary work in 18th and 19th century Alta California. This mission system was designed to irreparably reshape the Indigenous conceptual universe into that of a Christo-European worldview, to transform Native peoples into gente de razón. In addition, missions were the setting against which ecclesiastical and military colonists were in constant contact, and missionaries also used space as a moralizing tool, in an attempt to reform the lax morals of soldiers...
Identifying Deeply Buried Sites: A Case Study from Site CA-SLO-16, Morro Bay, California (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have historically studied the human-environment relationship through the lens of behavior, activity, and advancement. The study of past landscapes is focused on the human behavior response to these changes, not the effects these environmental changes have on archaeological sites. Geomorphological studies allow for understanding environmental...
Identifying Fremont Large Game Hunting Practices through the Modified General Utility Index and Strontium Isotope Analysis (2018)
The analysis of faunal bones from several Fremont sites have resulted in complications when compared to the Modified General Utility Index (MGUI). In this research, I explore the processing and transportation techniques of Fremont hunters at Wolf Village by comparing skeletal frequencies to the MGUI. Then, I compare these frequencies with results of strontium isotope analysis on small artiodactyl teeth from Wolf Village to determine which species were obtained locally. I also identify the...
Illuminating Event-Based Significance at Three Rock Art Sites on Vandenberg AFB, CA (2018)
Although we now have highly technical equipment that allows analyses and observations of rock art in new ways, this should in no way diminish pursuing our personal sense of curiosity, ability to develop hypotheses out of hunches, and test those hypotheses as best we can, to discover layers of significance for a rock art site that no piece of equipment would ever be capable of detecting. One such area of inquiry is consideration of ephemeral, event-based ways rock art interplays with the...
Impacts of Abrupt Climate Change Events on Human Paleodemography in the Great Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A central question of research on prehistoric human-environment interaction concerns the role of abrupt versus gradual climate and environmental changes on human demography. This research requires high resolution, regional-scale paleoenvironmental records that provide researchers with the ability to discern variable spatial...