North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Christensen.

Data and spatial visualization programs afford archaeologists various ways of showcasing their research. Programs, such as the Knight Foundation’s free StoryMap JS, and Esri StoryMaps, are of particular use when sharing our research results with the public and, I argue, are useful for conducting collaborative research with communities. In this paper, I detail the experience of using online StoryMap programs in the creation of local history maps created by undergraduate students in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Doherty.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite its prominence in Paleoindian archaeology throughout much of North America, Clovis has long been overshadowed in the Great Basin by the potentially contemporary, and locally more prolific, Western Stemmed Tradition. Despite decades of research, the relationship between the two distinct techno-complexes remains unclear. Largely due to difficulties...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelli Wathen. Alex Morrison. Michelle Wienhold.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. California’s Central Coast is characterized by a variety of environments that would have offered indigenous peoples a plethora of resources for nearly ten thousand years. Over the course of nearly a century of archaeological investigations, thousands of sites have been identified in the region. Since the 1950s, radiocarbon dating has offered relatively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Sunell.

The Santa Barbara Channel region of southern California lacks reliable sources of high quality toolstone except in a few prominent locations. The nearest obsidian sources are hundreds of miles away, and local chert can be highly variable in quality and availability. Monterey chert, common to both the northern Channel Islands and the adjacent mainland, varies widely in terms of inclusions, color, and consistency; Franciscan chert from the mainland is similarly troublesome for tool-makers on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Fuld. Terry Ozbun.

Located on the northern fringe of the Great Basin, in Lake County, Oregon, the Glass Buttes volcanic complex is the most important obsidian toolstone source in North America. Glass Buttes obsidian is world renowned because it is colorful, abundant, available in large pieces, and of extremely high quality for making flaked stone tools. Throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene, Native Americans have continuously used Glass Buttes obsidian, and it was widely traded in the Pacific Northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tessa Amend.

This is an abstract from the "Crucial Issues in United States Department of Defense Cultural Resources Management " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Orchard Combat Training Center (OCTC) is a premier joint combined arms training site, located on the western Snake River Plain in southern Idaho. Military training activities often come with an added risk of wildfire, and like much of the western United States, climate change has increased the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David G. Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations of historic industrial sites in the American West have long been dominated by questions surrounding power, resistance, and the emergence of class structures and ideologies. While these questions are still relevant, these sites offer the potential for a much wider range of anthropologically situated research that extends beyond...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Knell.

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. This paper summarizes the spatial and temporal distribution, technology, and subsistence patterns of Clovis/fluted and Western Stemmed tradition sites and isolates in the southern Great Basin, particularly the Mojave Desert. Fluted and Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points/sites occur throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daron Duke. D. Craig Young.

The Old River Bed delta is a premier open-air Paleoindian locality in the eastern Great Basin. Its chief distinction is scale—some 2,000 square kilometers-plus of nearly continuous and single-component archaeological material on what would have been the largest basin wetland in the region. But the record is largely surficial. In this poster, we detail a series of sites that have yielded temporal data from buried cultural contexts. The sites help clarify the broader associations of artifact types...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Jenkins.

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. Recent University of Oregon investigations at the Paisley and Connley Caves have resulted in 300+ radiocarbon ages including coprolites with human DNA. Earliest human occupations have been established at the Paisley Caves by stone tool cut marks on bone dated to 12,380 ± 70 14C yr B.P. Western Stemmed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Mauck. Alexandra McCleary. Ryan Nordness.

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since time immemorial, the Serrano people have maintained a close relationship with their ancestral lands, and have been tasked by the Creator to steward these lands in meaningful ways. As such, the Cultural Resources Management Department for the San Manuel Band of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clare Bedford. David Robinson.

The composition of background substrate, overpainted layers and admixtures can influence the data acquired from portable instrumentation at rock art sites. An understanding of the extent and impact of this influence is crucial when comparing in situ rock art pigments with potential source materials. This study uses an experimental process to assess the impact of factors such as a pigment thickness, overpainting, and addition of organic binders on the readings acquired using portable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Grant.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Deep Creek Investigation is a small legacy collection of artifacts and documents from the Deep Creek Site (CA-SBR-176), which is located in the Mojave River Forks region in San Bernardino County, CA, within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Los Angeles District. This collection was recently rehabilitated by technicians at the Veterans Curation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie Sgheiza. P. Willey.

A critical question concerning the Point San Jose (PSJ) skeletal remains is the nature of the living population from which the assemblage was derived. We approach this issue indirectly through comparison with other mortality profiles. Here, we report the age, sex, and ancestry of the PSJ skeletal remains, and compare them with those parameters of other groups. The comparative age distributions consist of the 1870 California mortality census, 1870 California living census (as a proxy for a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Contreras. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists increasingly leverage ideal distribution models to analyze settlement and demographic patterning in the past. Successful application requires adequate, spatially explicit proxies of both environmental suitability and past population. This paper focuses on the latter, recognizing that a growing number of studies rely on summaries of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Nelson.

This is an abstract from the "Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When working with Native American and Indigenous peoples toward the goal of social justice in archaeology, scholars must remember that "research may not be the intervention that is needed" (Tuck and Yang 2014:236). In exploring this issue with communities, it is crucial to decenter the position of scholars and refocus on the desires of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Harvey.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years after their introduction, ideal distribution models have recently contributed to our understanding of numerous behavioral processes. In this paper, I argue these models hold the potential to increase our understanding of a broader suite of behaviors including, but not limited to,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Peterson.

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In addition to being a primary concern for descendant community stakeholders, the identification of food ingredients, their supply, and their uses are an increasingly important avenue for investigating the health effects of labor and care practices in the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Chinese diaspora, especially for railroad workers and at other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denay Grund. D. Craig Young. Douglas Boyle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painters Flat is a small basin along the California/Nevada border and has never been described in literature. This past summer, the Far Western Anthropological Research Group recorded numerous sites spanning the entire chronological sequence for the region. Along with archaeological data, I collected information on landforms, profiles, and outcrops to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erick Robinson. Judson Finley.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fremont societies represent the northernmost adoption of agriculture in Western North America. Research on the Fremont provides one of the few opportunities in the world to understand the processes behind both the adoption and the abandonment of agriculture. Decades of research have illustrated how variability is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Sunell. Christopher Jazwa.

This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region of southern California are well known among archaeologists for developing complex sociopolitical systems within a hunter-gatherer-fisher subsistence system. This includes the advent of both hereditary high-status leaders and craft specialization in the form of shell bead and stone drill...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleni Kotoula. David Robinson. Clare Bedford.

This presentation discusses two complementary approaches for visualization of pictographs; interactive relighting and diagrammatic representation. Visible and false colour Reflectance Transformation Images (RTI) provide enhanced visualization of texture in combination with colour enhancement. By extension, the proposed techniques offer the opportunity to explore the characteristics and application of paint as well as the layering and preservation state of pictographs. The extracted information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Lau-Ozawa. Ryan Kennedy.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of diaspora has grown in many directions during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It has become a key way of understanding the short-term and long-term connections between people and communities defined by movement and migration. However, archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Wolberg. Judson Finley. Erick Robinson.

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. Fremont farmers of the northern Colorado Plateau grew maize at the margins of cultivation in western North America. Like other Indigenous farmers throughout the American Southwest, Fremont farmers used bundled agricultural niches where alluvial floodplains were the largest available site for cultivation. But dryland...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents a history of prehistoric plant use based on starches recovered from plant processing tools at O’Malley Shelter, Lincoln County, Nevada. O’Malley Shelter (26LN418) is an important archaeological site in the Clover Mountains near the Great Basin’s southern margin, with an 8,000-year long record of occupation. Extraction and analysis of...