North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (452 Records)
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 presentation will discuss several sites in the southern Antelope Valley (western Mojave Desert) that were occupied in the late nineteenth century by Chemehuevi family groups. At one of these sites, a traditional circular structure—dwelling—dating from that era was photographed in...
Chemical and Standardization Analysis Results on Fremont Snake Valley Black-on-gray Pottery (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists widely argue that Fremont potters from the Parowan Valley, in southwestern Utah, manufactured Snake Valley pottery. For my research, I examined various properties of Snake Valley Black-on-gray (SVBG) ceramics using metric data, statistical methods, and newly obtained neutron activation analysis data. I compared my data results on SVBG sherds...
Chinese Mining in the Snake River Canyon of Southern Idaho (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the autumn of 1870 Euroamerican miners in the Snake River Canyon lifted their prohibition of 'Chinese emigration' enacted the previous May at the Shoshone Falls. Historic accounts suggest the easily accessible river bar deposits were playing out, and as one miner noted, “The Chinese are better adapted to this sort of mining”. While most Chinese...
A Chronological Multisite Analysis of Shellfish Gathering Strategies in the King Range National Conservation Area, Northwest California (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The King Range National Conservation Area (KRNCA), located in southern Humboldt County, California, has been of particular interest to archaeologists since the 1970s. Early archaeological investigations in the KRNCA were crucial for developing regional North Coast chronologies and have yielded some of the oldest coastal sites north of San Francisco Bay....
Chumash Watercraft, Maritime Exchange, and Sociopolitical Complexity (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. Jeanne Arnold explored the relationship between advanced boat technology and sociopolitical complexity in her research and in many publications. She investigated the origins of the Chumash tomol (plank canoe) and emphasized its key role in facilitating...
Citizen Science Archaeology at Bodie State Historic Park (2018)
Bodie State Historic Park is located in the western Great Basin, near the California and Nevada border and encompasses a 2,900-acre historical landscape comprised of buildings, archaeological sites, and features related to 80 years of Gold Rush era mining. Cultural and natural resources at Bodie are at risk of being lost due to wildfires, earthquakes, and lack of funding. Discussing the application of digital heritage methods in the Bodie 3D Project, this paper focuses on community-engaged...
Classification of Fremont Ceramics Using a Neural Network (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic classification is central to archaeological analysis, but without systematic and objective quantification, archaeologists cannot determine the definitive number of types or what they represent, despite decades of research. Recently archaeologists have applied machine learning models to improve the effectiveness of ceramic classification and extend...
A Clean Break: A Departure from Standard Typologies through an Investigation of Pottery Temper at Joshua Tree National Park (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 will focus on my current master’s research and is in joint partnership between the University of New Mexico, Joshua Tree National Park, and the descendant communities from the California Desert. The project developed through consultation with the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, and Agua...
Cleaning Up a Stinky Ghost Town: Developing the Townsite of Sulphur, Nevada, into a Cultural Interpretive Site (2023)
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 Sulphur Townsite is a 400-acre, NRHP-eligible historic archaeological site in northwest Nevada. The site is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Black Rock Field Office within the Winnemucca District. Although originally developed into a cultural interpretive site in...
Clearing Away the Cobwebs: The AVCAR Orphaned Collections and Innovative Undergraduate Research (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. The Antelope Valley Archaeological Repository (AVCAR) houses over 300 archaeological sites from the western Mojave Desert. These collections constitute over 40 years of compliance-based and salvage archaeological excavations led by Antelope Valley College and the Antelope Valley...
Climate Change and Other Effects to Aboriginal Medicine (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. America’s first people have been extremely knowledgeable about animals, plants, and fungi they ingest and/or breathe in for medicinal purposes. Medicine, from a Native perspective, is something honored, taken in for healing and well-being, to be used with respect and knowledge, with spiritual reverence and recognition of cultural continuity....
Climate, Prey Choice, Signaling, and Risk: An Integrated Analysis of Holocene Hunting in the Bonneville and Wyoming Basins, USA (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we synthesize the available empirical data on return rates for artiodactyls and lagomorphs and explore and integrate different currencies to guide a trans-Holocene analysis of variation in artiodactyl hunting using massive archaeofaunal datasets from predominantly open-air sites from the Bonneville and Wyoming...
Climatic Controls on Prehistoric Utah Populations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recognizing how climate variability altered the landscape in regards to nutrient availability is a key aspect in reconstructing how prehistoric peoples were able to thrive. Further, understanding how past climate and environmental change affected organisms is important for predicting the role of imminent future climate change on populations today. Previous...
Combating the Ongoing Erasure of Native Americans from Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Archaeological Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It’s been over 25 years since Lightfoot published his seminal article on the ethnocentric and arbitrary dichotomy between prehistoric and historical archaeology, and numerous authors have since echoed his sentiment. Yet, problems of this nature persist in cultural resource management in California, as Panich and Schneider have demonstrated in their 2019...
Communal Trapping and Pinyon Exploitation in the Wovoka Wilderness (2018)
Heritage resources are recognized as a characteristic of the relatively new Wovoka Wilderness, created in 2014. Located in western Nevada’s Pine Grove Hills and in the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow, resources relate to pine nut exploitation and communal artiodactyl hunting. The Wichman deer game trap still has standing corral posts, providing insights about the structure and function of Great Basin traps. Other game traps, blinds, rock rings, brush huts and bow stave trees are among the resources...
Comparing Energy Expenditures of Mortar and Pestle and Grinding Slab Technologies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Daily activities such as grinding plant material require energy input. It is ideal to put in the least amount of work to obtain the greatest yield of product. Energetic expenditures and returns for grinding slab and mortar and pestle use remain largely unstudied. In this study, resting and grinding heart-rate...
A Comparison of Changing Reduction Sequences of Obsidian from the Grandad Site in the Central Sierra, California (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This is an investigation of obsidian chipping waste from the Grandad site, located in the Central Sierra near Mariposa, California based on point types found in deposits that have shown evidence of continuous occupation from 9000 BP to European contact. We searched for evidence of a changing reduction sequence from biface blank characteristics of large...
A Comparison of DNA Metabarcoding and Macroremains Analysis for Dietary Reconstruction using Coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coprolites are increasingly the subject of multiproxy analyses, but there is need to determine how the data, results, and interpretation of coprolite contents could differ depending on the methods chosen. This study presents a comparison of DNA metabarcoding and macroremains analysis performed on ten coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada....
A Comprehensive Analysis of Faunal Remains from Lovejoy Springs (CA-LAN-192) (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. Located in the western Mojave Desert community of Lake Los Angeles, Lovejoy Springs (CA-LAN-192), is a large village site with extensive occupation beginning as early as 4000 BP. Four cultural components have been identified at the site—Pinto, Gypsum, Rose Spring, and Late Prehistoric....
The Consequences of Drought: Inadvertent Discoveries on Federal Land (2019)
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. Several years of unrelenting drought in California has resulted in historically-low drawdowns to the state’s reservoirs. A corollary effect has been a notable increase in the number of inadvertent discoveries along the newly-exposed shorelines, an occurrence that has clear implications for NAGPRA. In response,...
Considering Women's Tech Choices: Grinding Efficiency and Performance Characteristics of Hunter-Gatherer Milling Tools (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Milling tools were a cornerstone of many plant-based hunter-gatherer economies. Women are often involved in food processing and would have used these tools, in some cases daily, to expand the breadth of foods available for consumption. Despite their important economic role, few studies have compared...
Context for Petroglyphs: Recent Results from the Valley of Fire Archaeological Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Famous for its striking natural landscapes, abundant petroglyphs and important prehistory, Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park is well known to the public, but our picture of the archaeological remains from here is piecemeal rather than comprehensive. A new joint project by College of Southern Nevada, Nevada State Parks, the State Historic...
Convergence of Tears at Momonga: Spiritual, Social and Personal Interactions of the Multiethnic Mourning Ceremony (2018)
The village of Momonga (Ca-LAn-357) is located in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, along the pre-Columbian boundaries of multiple ethnic groups. Rock art in the area indicates ritual activities involving people from various cultural traditions, including ancestral Chumash, Tongva, Yokuts, and Tataviam peoples. Excavations in a portion of the site have produced exchange and utilitarian items, such as shell beads, stone beads, amulets, stone bowls, hammer stones, pressure flakes,...
Cooperative Foraging Strategies and Technological Investment in the Western Great Basin: An Investigation of Archaeological Remains from the Winnemucca Lake Caves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates evidence for the intensity and development of cooperative foraging strategies and investment in cordage and lithic technologies through time in the western Great Basin. It specifically addresses (1) when the region’s inhabitants invested in cordage technology used to create cooperation-oriented nets; (2) when the region’s inhabitants...
Could Large Mammal Faunal Remains Provide Indirect Evidence of Precontact Landscape Management? (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. It is widely acknowledged that fire was used throughout the western United States as a landscape management tool. Direct archaeological evidence is rare and successful studies that identify Native American burning rely on multidisciplinary approaches. One such study in California by Lightfoot,...