North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Jerrems.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a long history of horse exploitation throughout Eurasia; for instance, the Boxgrove site, England (500 kya), the Schöningen site, Germany (350 kya), and numerous Late Pleistocene sites spread across Eurasia (from the Aurignacian thru the Magdalenian 45 kya–15 kya). The evidence suggests that horses were only second in line of importance to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chase Beck. Vaughn Bryant. Dennis Jenkins.

In studying the early inhabitants of North America, some of the frequently revisited questions involve how they lived, what they ate, and what their world was like. Archaeological Palynology is a well understood method for addressing these questions. Because of the constant pollen rain and the purposeful and incidental ingestion of pollen and spores, well-preserved pollen is repeatedly found in association with human habitation sites and human artifacts. Paisley Caves, Oregon, established itself...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ligman. Tina Hart. Michael Terlep.

Although portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) has routinely been used successfully to identify the geochemical source of lithic materials across North America, comparatively few studies apply pXRF to compositional and geochemical sourcing studies of rock art pigments. Logan Simpson conducted exploratory in situ analyses using non-invasive pXRF to analyze the elemental composition of manufactured rock art pigments used to produce prehistoric pictographs at several rock art sites across the Great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Makaela O'Rourke. Scott Thomas.

Prehistoric pottery is rare in Oregon, and the presence of pottery at the Skull Creek Dunes site in Catlow Valley of Southern Oregon is potentially important. This paper builds on the previous excavation and research by Scott Thomas of the Burns BLM and describes the pottery and work done on it since. These sherds represent one of the oldest pottery traditions in Oregon, and were likely made on site. Initial dating places the site around 1250 CE. In addition to the sherds, small possible gaming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Sosa Aguilar. Felicia De Peña.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Practical approaches to Indigenous Archaeology in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) can have real impacts on United States archaeology. This paper discusses the broader theoretical approaches and “high-level” changes that are being made (or could/should) be made in CRM. What types of changes can field techs/archaeologists make that work towards a more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Jerrems.

The Winnemucca Lake basin, one of many branches of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan in northwest Nevada, is again in the headline news for early human occupation of the Great Basin. Possible horse butchering at the end of the Pleistocene, fuel storage, grasshopper caching (14,195 cal. BP) and ancient rock art add to the intrigue of an ever developing mystery behind North Americas earliest ancestry. Most familiar are Fishbone and Crypt caves, a part of the Guano Mountain cave complex, where a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Vernon. Kate Magargal. D. Craig Young. David Zeanah. Brian Codding.

Despite decades of work, debate persists regarding the nature and extent of Prearchaic land use patterns in the North American Great Basin. While some archaeologists argue that Prearchaic hunter-gatherers favored a broad diet and, therefore, relied on a generalist land use strategy, others insist that they favored a narrow diet, thus relying instead on a specialist land use strategy. To help resolve these debates, here we ask the simple question: what environmental parameters drive variation in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Allgaier. Brian Codding.

Researchers propose that the first people to occupy the Great Basin preferentially settled near pluvial lakes to exploit highly profitable wetland habitats. However, a systematic evaluation of this hypothesis has yet to be undertaken. Here we test predictions from an ideal free distribution model to determine if the settlement decisions of Prearchaic foragers were indeed biased toward pluvial ecosystems. The results not only elucidate Prearchaic settlement patterns, but also establish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Allgaier. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first occupants of the Great Basin settled the region when highly profitable wetland environments were abundant, but their spatial distribution was highly variable. Results of our earlier work identified an interesting pattern driven by this variation: Prearchaic (>8000 BP) settlements in the Lahontan and Bonneville Basins were closer to pluvial lakes than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taryn Johnson. Anna Linderholm.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The genetic composition of paleofeces from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter (BER) can aid environmental and dietary reconstruction, as the genomic content of coprolites change as environmental conditions shifted from cool and moist in the Pleistocene to hot and dry in the Holocene and as new food sources appeared locally. In order to analyse the potential shift...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Binning.

Diverse rocks of the Precambrian to the Late Cenozoic are exposed across the greater Mojave Desert Region. In the central Mojave, locations with concentrations of knapable materials are prevalent. Most of these sources are deflated alluvial fan deposits; less than five percent are outcrops. Over the last 13,000 years people have been using the area, percussion biface reduction dominated at both the material extraction sites and habitation and special activity sites. Igneous materials were...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Alicia Jensen.

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. The United Comstock Merger Mill, locally known as the American Flat Mill, was a cyanide mill constructed in 1922 on the eastern portion of the American Flat near Virginia City, Nevada. This mill, located within the boundaries of the Virginia City National Historic Landmark,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ally Gerlach.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public archaeology is being increasingly practiced. Goals of this practice include creating accessibility beyond academia and placing an increased emphasis on archaeology with interpretations and benefits for indigenous, stakeholder, and descendent communities. This paper examines the steps taken to engage in public archaeology through artifact display and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Ramhorst.

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. It is the responsibility of the Wells Field Office (WFO) of the Elko District of the Bureau of Land Management to ensure federal undertakings comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) on public lands. In addition to compliance work, WFO culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Culleton. Margaret Davis. Richard Rosencrance. Thomas Connolly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of an ongoing collaboration dating ethnographic collections, the University of Oregon sent a piece of a leather moccasin to the PSU Radiocarbon Lab for dating. The moccasin was recovered in 1938 from a near-surface deposit of Roaring Springs Cave, Oregon. Another moccasin from this context produced an anomalously old radiocarbon age – 7670±35 BP –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morgan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Radiocarbon summed probability distributions (SPDs) have become increasingly popular as means to track demographic trends, and by association, any variety of explanations for changes in past behavior. This paper uses SPDs from across California to develop hypotheses as to the ostensible effects of climate, technological change, population movements, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Goebel. Bryan Hockett.

During the decade-long excavations at Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, eastern Nevada, a well-stratified sequence of cultural components spanning from Paleoindian times to the late Archaic was documented. In this poster we present the results of a comprehensive analysis of the biface and bifacial point assemblage from the shelter, exploring temporal variability in raw-material procurement and selection, production, and use of this artifact class from 13,000 years ago to the late prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Hoffman. Jake Fruhlinger. Linda Reynard. Erick Robinson.

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dry Creek Rockshelter provides important evidence for the deep history of human occupation in the Boise foothills. Our recent reinvestigation of this site suggests a reinterpretation of its occupation history. This work provides a new model for collaboration between archaeologists and Native American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Hull.

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. Land-use patterns of seasonally mobile hunter-gatherers present a particular set of challenges to archaeological recognition of post-1492 indigenous residential sites in the colonial hinterlands of California. The relatively short duration of site use, frequent re-use of sites episodically occupied in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Burns.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For settlement pattern analysis where territorial exclusion is assumed to be at play, Fretwell and Lucas's 1969 model is still the core explanation for IDD. Rather than focus on population density, it would be more in keeping with formal models of behavioral ecology to analyze the dynamic through marginal analysis. Established groups should defend...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Sykora. Justin Tackney. R. Kelly Beck. Dennis H. O'Rourke. Jack M. Broughton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analyses have for some time suggested that California tule elk (Cervus elaphus nannodes) populations were depressed by late Holocene hunters, and more recent preliminary analyses focused on aDNA and stable isotopes (carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen) have supported that conclusion. This work indicated a significant decrease over time in genetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Wooten.

This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological site records are a tool for recording not only a site’s cultural constituents—landscapes, features, artifacts, built environment components, etc.—but also a format for documenting any adverse impacts that have occurred to those resources. What if those site record forms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharyl Kinnear-Ferris.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Collections: Federal Archaeology and "New Discoveries" under NAGPRA" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recovery and reburial of inadvertent discoveries of exposed pre-Columbian human remains has repeatedly occurred at a remote archaeological site along the Lost Coast of the King Range National Conservation Area, managed by the Bureau of Land Management-Arcata Field Office. The site is located in a remote area,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hoover.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence of a large site in southern Monterey County, California, is likely the ethnohistoric village of Assil, chiefly capital of a district of the same name. Part of the site is submerged by the waters of Lake San Antonio. The site played a crucial role in an 1818 battle between the Yokuts invaders and the Spanish with their Salinan allies. The village...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Firenzi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I examine the potential for using higher resolution environmental records to expand on existing Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) model applications on California’s Northern Channel Islands. In this project, I take advantage of recent advances in paleoenvironmental research and higher resolution proxy methods (e.g., sclerochronology) since previous...