North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Jerrems. Jerry Jerrems.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Israel Russell in 1883 suggested that the shorelines of ancient Lake Lahontan were so pristine that the lake must have been only a few hundred years old. Today it is known that this spectacular Pleistocene Lake, present in a unique environment, has been around for at least the last two million years with an extraordinarily complex history. Increasing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noel Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mobility has long been seen as a key strategy for foragers in marginal environments, where movement around the landscape sought to take advantage of natural resources that often have narrow windows of availability. While mobility has often focused solely on obsidian conveyance in the Great Basin, ethnographic accounts suggest that food resources were more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robyn Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A number of sizable rock art sites occur along the ephemeral drainages of the Bennett Hills located in the Snake River Plain of south central Idaho. The Bennett Hills are a range of tangled ridges, canyons and drainages that trend east-west for over 60 miles. This poster session will highlight four of those rock art sites (Thorn Creek, Grasshopper Cave, Hidden...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Torben Rick. Natasha Vokhshoori. Todd Braje. Christine France. Matthew McCarthy.

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. Understanding the social, political, and economic dynamics of coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers was a hallmark of Jeanne Arnold’s multi-decade archaeological research. Arnold integrated marine climate records and archaeological data to develop hypotheses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Mohr.

In the Great Basin, most substantial Paleoindian sites are found on landforms associated with extinct lakes and wetlands, suggesting that early groups had a special affinity for lacustrine settings. The Lahontan Basin of western Nevada contains a rich record of Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene (TP/EH) lake-level fluctuation and an extensive record of Paleoindian occupation. In 2008, Ken Adams and colleagues compared the relationship between site location and lakeshores of known ages using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Morales.

The Rose Valley site (CA-INY-1799) has considerable potential for providing a deeper understanding of Paleo-Indian adaptations in the Far West. For over 40 years, archaeologists have observed artifacts on the surface of the Rose Valley Site that suggest the presence of a terminal Pleistocene-early Holocene component. Recent analyses of existing collections by other researchers have revealed Paleoindian artifacts such as Clovis/Great Basin Concave Base points, Great Basin stemmed points,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Lenzi. William Bloomer. Zygmunt Osiecki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological testing at three sites on the Sierra Army Depot in Honey Lake Valley recovered several Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene artifacts. Obsidian hydration rim measurements on tools and debitage display remarkably thick hydration rinds (~9.0-11.0 microns) and confirm very early occupations. Results of X-ray fluorescence sourcing reveal a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Mallios.

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. The Nathan Harrison Historical Archaeology Project, a 20-year undertaking that sought to understand and communicate the life and legacies of San Diego County’s first African American homesteader, employs orthogonal thought and archaeological, anthropological, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gusick.

Migration is a fundamental aspect of humanity and archaeologists have long been interested in studies of human mobility. Some archaeologists have taken a historical ecological approach to understanding human movement and how a deep history can inform on mobility in contemporary society. By leveraging knowledge from a variety of disciplines, these archaeologists have made great strides in our understanding of past human movement as it relates to postglacial human dispersals and climate change, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Conti. Tessa Amend. Jake Fruhlinger. Erick Robinson.

This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic technological organization research depends on multiscalar perspectives connecting macroscales of land use and raw material economics to microscales of individual sites. Surface sites comprise a major source of data in many lithic technological organization studies. These sites are often recorded one time and rarely monitored. This can lead to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Whitley. Kristina Doyle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Carrizo Plain National Monument (CPNM) contains a large number of structures and features associated with historical agriculture on the Carrizo Plain. This largely intact cultural landscape spans a period of significance from the Homestead Act through industrial scale dryland farming. Historical and archaeological contexts have been developed for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Jarquin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record of the Late Holocene in the Lake Abert-Chewaucan Marsh Basin provides insights into hunter-gatherer mobility and response to climatic change. This paper aims to provide a framework and understanding of how hunter-gatherers adapted to living on the landscape of the largest North American fault scarp, Abert Rim, in south-central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hoppa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eastern Santa Cruz Island has a high density of archeological sites dating from 10,000 BP through historic contact, and at least seven associated Chumash place names. The area has freshwater seeps, abundant chert toolstone, and access to rich marine resources, including boat anchorages. At the time of historic contact, the largest Chumash village on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Busch. Nicolas Angeloff.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides context to the linguistic and migrational prehistory of Northwest California and reinterprets the common narrative in light of the recent discovery of a Clovis point in Larabee Valley which extends the reach of Paleoindians into Humboldt County, California for the first time.

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the time of European contact, a high degree of linguistic diversity characterized Native California, implying a long prehistory of different ethnic groups migrating into the region. Previous research, using mitochondrial DNA samples contributed by living descendants, produced correlations between certain genetic markers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth. Kara Jones.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harold Dibble’s focus on the multiple ways that lithics were used, modified, and transported across the landscape have been critical to Paleolithic studies but also have important applications in other areas. In this paper, we use data on lithic procurement, use, and reuse from sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Nicolay. Miranda Fengel.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “Entangled,” his landmark theoretical work on the relationship between human beings and material culture, Ian Hodder emphasized the importance of understanding how things endure differently than people. Thus longer-lived objects can bridge gaps and carry meaning between multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Pay. C. Cliff Creger. Beth P. Smith.

One tough issue facing federal agencies in the United States and their archaeologists is how to document historic era transportation routes. In Nevada alone, there are nearly 6,000 miles of roads managed by the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) most of which follow, cross or parallel historic routes. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages nearly 48 million acres (~75,000 sq miles) of land in the state of Nevada with several thousands of miles of historic routes. This being the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Cannon. Anna Cohen.

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. Water heritage associated with water use and management, including infrastructure like canals, irrigation ditches, and ponds, and intangible heritage like traditions, experiences, stories, and myths, reveals how past and present communities adapt to uncertain climatic and changing social conditions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Minerbi. Elisabeth Rareshide.

Studies of embodied learning show that physical experiences which engage the sensory and motor processing parts of the brain enhance understanding and retention of concepts. Making an obsidian flake, rather than just seeing pictures of stone tools, is a memorable experience that can provide a tangible connection to the practices of past people. We present a case study in public outreach and pedagogy for the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians of Southern California. The original concept,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peiqi Zhang. Caleb Chen. Christopher Beckham. Daniel Goring. Meredith Carlson.

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. The shift to mortars and pestles is associated with the acorn-based resource intensification in central California, which is also linked with decreased mobility and changes in social organization. Many long (>35 cm) and completely shaped pestles are associated with Late period California (cal AD 1265–1770)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Certain current rock art debates involve methodological rather than empirical issues (as incorrectly but commonly assumed), reflecting researchers’ unfamiliarity with principles of symbolic analysis and the resulting functions and meanings of rock art sites. One key error concerns the fact that symbols are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Lowman.

Farmers, gardeners, builders, cooks, janitors, launderers, restaurant-owners: the Chinese diaspora community in nineteenth century Stanford, California, was made up of men, and a few women, who took on many ways of working to support themselves, their families, and their communities. Their integral role in the development of the Bay Area’s infrastructure is sometimes obscured because of systematic exclusion, destruction, and erasure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Guzman.

Mapping Prehistoric Behavior Patterns at a Lithic Tool Stone Source in the Colorado Desert: Results of Geospatial Analysis at CA-IMP-008/H This paper sets out results obtained following a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of the spatial patterning of stone tools at a study area in the Colorado Desert of southern California. Stone tools are examined based on their utility for an explanation of their use and importance in the lives of prehistoric foragers. Current efforts to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Morris. Isabel Rivera-Collazo. John Hildebrand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans had established presence on California’s Channel Islands by the Younger Dryas (YD) Period (~12.9-11.7 ky BP), during which stable sea level was relatively stable for ~1 ky. No archaeological sites from this time have been identified on the nearby continental shelf, likely destroyed by subsequent rapid sea level rise, but submerged paleochannels...