North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Conti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ethnographic record for southern Idaho indicates that pottery was primarily utilized for camas processing in the uplands and occasionally as stewpots. However, recent investigations reveal that Late Archaic ceramics occur beyond just riverine and upland locations, suggesting a broader use of pottery. This study aims to delve deeper into these findings...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Saper. Richard Rosencrance. Katelyn McDonough. Geoffrey Smith. Dennis Jenkins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some researchers support a “long” chronology for corner-notched points in the northern and eastern Great Basin, with some points dating as old as 8500 cal BP. Other researchers support a “short” chronology and argue that corner-notched points almost exclusively postdate 5000 cal BP. This debate suffers from the use of a variety of typological schemes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Ciolek-Torello. Donn Grenda. Patrick Stanton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts suggest that the Gabrielino were a complex hunter-gatherer society similar to their Chumash neighbors. They had a rich and elaborate material culture and a ranked society with a chiefly class. Building upon previous research on Chumash burial grounds, we report the results of an intensive multi-year study of a Gabrielino village and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Wolfe.

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The final regression of Lake Bonneville during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition resulted in dramatic environmental changes in the Bonneville basin, followed by further environmental fluctuations throughout the Holocene. Recent research of faunal and floral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Santos Ceniceros-Rodríguez. Paul Collins. Amira Ainis. René Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Non-cultural deposits and animal accumulations have been important for reconstructing past environmental conditions. In western North America, packrat middens have been analyzed to infer past vegetation communities, precipitation rates, and other environmental variables. In this poster, we analyze owl-generated pellets deposited over a 1,500-year period at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Wyatt.

This is an abstract from the "Digging Deeper: Pushing Ourselves to Engage the Public in Our Shared Heritage through Outreach and Education" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Every spring, the Battle Mountain BLM, Mount Lewis Field Office, puts on a presentation for 6th graders from the local elementary school. The presentations are conducted at the Mill Creek Campground, approximately 30 minutes south of Battle Mountain. It is an all-day event, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Tushingham.

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. Anarchic societies resist despotic rule and centralized political power. Such systems are far from chaotic and developed and prospered throughout much of western North America. Both human behavioral ecology (HBE) and anarchist theory offer explanatory frameworks for understanding heterarchy as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Hill. Laurel Engbring. David Grant. Monica V. Arellano. Alan Leventhal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation applies Tilley and Cameron’s 2014 Index of Care to the mortuary population of three ancestral Muwekma Ohlone sites that were excavated in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2016- 2022 (CA-ALA-565/H, CA-ALA-677/H, and CA-ALA-704/H). These sites include the remains of 147 individuals dating between approximately 2200-110 cal BP. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hall.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historic-era skeletal samples from the United States routinely reflect marginalized and vulnerable populations, many of which were also subject to dissection, a partible practice widely considered a form of desecration in the nineteenth century. Using historic and osteological data from a skeletal assemblage (MNI=25) at Point San Jose in San Francisco, CA (AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wake.

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. Fragmented bits of worked bone are relatively common in coastal California habitation refuse—or shell middens. I examine collections of worked bone from various mainland and Channel Island archaeological sites with a focus on understanding the role of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dudgeon. Pamela Pascali. Rebecca Hazard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 20 archaeologically-identified obsidian sources occur as inter-bedded surface exposures and stream-transported alluvial deposits within and along the margins of Idaho’s Snake River Plain. Previous research has documented the differential frequency of source use through time and variation in material transport distance for southern Idaho obsidians,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pryor. Shelby Jones-Cervantes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster reports on a collaborative research project between CSU-Fresno Anthropology Department, UC San Diego, and the Santa Rosa Rancheria (Tachi Yokut). Baked clay or daub is an underappreciated piece of evidence from our past. Archeologists often find pieces or concentrations of daub in old Native American village sites that occur in California’s Central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Danis.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In January 2018 United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland, CA homeless encampments. Farha reportedly remarked, "every person I spoke to today has told me, 'we are human beings.’ But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong." The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Shoup. Molly Fierer-Donaldson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of recent data recovery excavations at CA-ALA-11, a coastal shell midden located on San Francisco Bay. Our excavations recovered 182 burials and 262 thermal features with dates predominantly from the Early Period through Middle 2 (2500 cal BCE to 600 cal CE). The excavation sheds light on resource use, environmental change,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Hofman. Torben Rick. Jesus Maldonado.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans have unintentionally and intentionally introduced rodents to islands around the world, sometimes causing local extirpation and extinction of endemic fauna. On the northern California Channel Islands, island deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus), may have arrived as stowaways on Native American canoes at least 10,000 years ago. Following this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pryor. Michael K Youngblood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. California Tribal Unilateral Apprenticeship Program (CTUAP) sets out to solve to fundamental problems: 1. Chronic unemployment and lack of job opportunities in Indian Country for tribal youth and 2. demand for diverse well trained archeological technicians in the field of Cultural Resource Management. CTUAP is an officially accredited California State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Meniketti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Trace element X-ray florescence analysis is applied to ceramics from sixteenth-century shipwrecks in order to help resolve the enduring mystery of the location of Sir Francis Drake’s brief landing on the west coast in 1579. The landing site has been debated for decades. Was it California, Oregon, or Washington? Various sites have been proposed and each has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Cobb. Manuel Duenas-Garcia. Waylon Coats. Miriam Campos Martinez. Scott Nicolay.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The preservation of cultural heritage through advanced technology allows us to understand and protect the past for future generations. This poster presents the Rock Art Heritage Preservation Project, a project aimed at digitally conserving the legacy of California Central Valley's rock art with the Southern Sierra Miwok Nation. California's landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Saper. Richard Rosencrance. Katelyn McDonough. Dennis Jenkins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cascade projectile point chronology in the northern Great Basin is poorly understood, with associated evidence ranging from the early to middle Holocene. The broad temporal range of Cascade points results from the difficulty in distinguishing this type from the more general "foliate" category and lack of well-dated sites containing such artifacts. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelli Barnes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A quick dive into regional databases can be invaluable in managing local resources. Updating regional contexts tends to be time consuming and expensive. However, obtaining general numbers of different site types, NRHP eligibility assessments, dates of use, and other basic information can be a quick exercise to guide future management. For example, basic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

Two different versions of a myth, one Kitanemuk and one Kawaiisu, recount the tradition of a man taken into a cave where he was instructed in sacred knowledge by animal spirits. Neighboring Chumash and Yokuts elders passed along accounts of caves being used for shamanistic purposes, in part associated with rock paintings. These ethnographic accounts imply the private use of caves for special rituals by individuals. Nonetheless, there are particular Chumash pictograph sites that appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Connolly. Perry Chocktoot.

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People recognize places on the landscape that have historical and spiritual importance to their communities, and it is often the case that different cultural communities sharing the same space have very different cultural maps. Among Tribal communities, identifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Noe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines mission documents, agricultural production reports, and faunal remains recovered from three middens situated alongside the Native American barracks at the Spanish mission site of Santa Clara (1777-1836). Mission Santa Clara housed a diverse population of differing Native American groups including predominantly Ohlone speakers, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje. Jillian Maloney. Amy Gusick. Jon Erlandson. Shannon Klotsko.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The California Northern Channel Islands contain one of the best preserved and most abundant records of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation in all of North America. These records have contributed to our understanding of early coastal migrations, the importance of Paleoindian maritime economies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hall. Tanner Whetstone.

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. The Black Rock Desert Basin (HUC-6 160402) comprises the largest basin in northwest Nevada. Covering approximately three billion hectares, this basin contains the Quinn River drainage and the Black Rock and Smoke Creek playas. A radiocarbon database for the basin was assembled from the peer-reviewed and cultural resource...