North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

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 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 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 Michael Polk.

I am primarily a western archaeologist and studied under Dr. William Lovis as a graduate student from 1976 to 1979. That was early in Bill’s career. I had many mentors in my formative years as an undergraduate and graduate student, as well as early in my archaeology career. Bill was my last academic mentor and the most influential. My training at Michigan State University has influenced my approach to archaeological projects, analysis of site data, and conclusions about such projects. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Bartelink. Sarah Hall.

In 2010, human remains were discovered in a medical waste pit behind the Civil War-era hospital at Point San Jose, San Francisco by National Park Service archaeologists. The commingled assemblage consisted of thousands of human bones, including cranial and dental remains. Extensive cut marks on these remains indicated they were used for anatomical dissection. Assessment of biological characteristics suggested that some of the individuals targeted for dissection are of non-European ancestry. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cayla Kennedy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in Utah’s northern Uinta Basin, the Cub Creek area of Dinosaur National Monument contains examples of Fremont pithouses, upland roasting features, diverse artifact assemblages, and panels of Classic-Vernal-style Fremont rock art. The Classic Vernal rock art style is characterized by geometric patterns, animals, and heavily stylized anthropomorphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Sturtz. Geoffrey Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Leonard Rockshelter is located in Pershing County, Nevada. Initially mined for bat guano, workers discovered artifacts in 1938, prompting a visit by Robert Heizer. Heizer returned to excavate the site in 1950 and reported more than 2 m of stratified deposits from which he recovered a modest assemblage of perishable and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Brown. Brian Barbier. Gina Mosqueda-Lucas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores Olivella shell money bead production among the Chumash during the Mission period in south-central California. An extensive examination of bead-making detritus recovered during recent archaeological excavations at Mission La Purisima Concepcion yielded insight into this extensive industry that flourished in the early nineteenth century....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amira Ainis. Jon Erlandson. René Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Faunal remains from two multi-component archaeological rockshelter sites on northeastern San Miguel Island are used to reconstruct aspects of nearshore ecosystems and investigate patterns in marine resource use through time. More than 90 14C dates demonstrate that Daisy Cave (CA-SMI-261) and Cave of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Haynes. Megan Stueve. David Page. Lisa Cipolla.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fort Hunter Liggett (FHL), in the central coastal region of California, contains a prodigious rock art record composed primarily of hundreds of red, black, and white pictographs. Most people familiar with this rock art know of the National Register-listed La Cueva Pintada, a large cave with several hundred overlapping elements, but there are also other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Gavette.

Seven years ago the National Park Service rehabilitated several of the oldest remaining buildings at Point San Jose (now Fort Mason) in San Francisco. On October 25, 2010, while monitoring lead remediation efforts around the former Army hospital (1863-1903), archaeologists discovered a pit containing hospital waste which included the commingled human remains of multiple individuals. Diagnostic bottles recovered from the feature support a deposit date of between 1860 and 1890. Historic research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Kendell. Colleen Milligan.

Cadavers have been used to study anatomy and practice anatomical dissection for over 2,000 years. For most of this time, the use of cadavers was neither ethical, nor legal. In U.S. medical study today, most cadavers come from body donation programs largely resulting from the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA), first proposed in 1968. The UAGA followed a change in social context of cadavers. It introduced the body as property and provided individuals the right to donate their body following...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Puckett.

Over the last 15,000 years, Walker Lake, NV has ranged in size from the southernmost branch of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan to a small alkali wetland. These conditions have provided valuable, but varied resources for local populations throughout human occupation. Sites identified during summer 2015 and 2016 illustrate the preservation of sites in environments where both submersion and drying have occurred. Investigations during summer 2017 revealed the presence of numerous landforms under the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Herb Dallas.

The concept of Millingstone has long and intriguing history in California Archaeology. Millingstone conjures up visions of early, simple, crude tools, and a confusing legacy. Millingstone Culture is not easy to define, though it is quite consistent throughout its geographic distribution. Millingstone never fit clearly into earlier theoretical paradigms. Millingstone has been variously described as a technology, as a culture, as an adaptation, as a Horizon, as a tradition, as a regional pattern,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Ogaz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1950, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) graduate student Georgiana Guthrie excavated Dry Lake Cave (CA-INY-1898). Located in Inyo County, California, the rock shelter is near Little Lake, the Stahl site, the Rose Spring site, and the Borden site. Dry Lake Cave is an east-facing basalt rock shelter that overlooks Rose Valley, providing occupants...