North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Barket. Andrew Garrison. Claudia Camacho-Trejo. David Sosa.

CA-MRP-283, the Hackney Site, is a late prehistoric/protohistoric site in Mariposa County, California. Excavated by California State University, Los Angeles in 1972, the flaked-stone assemblage includes debitage, projectile points, and flake tools. A reanalysis of the debitage shows that late stage biface production, expedient flake-tool production, and the production, repair, and replacement of projectile points were all common activities at the Hackney site. A recent analysis of the projectile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Smith. Richard Rosencrance. Katelyn McDonough.

This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Last Supper Cave (LSC) is located in the rugged High Rock Country of northwestern Nevada. Thomas Layton excavated the cave in 1973–1974 under the auspices of the Nevada State Museum. He recovered a diverse assemblage of lithic, fiber, and wooden objects including a number of Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points. Radiocarbon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Larry Loendorf has always emphasized that rock art research is nothing if it is not also archaeology. Much of his research has accordingly considered the importance of the (dirt) archaeological context of rock art sites, and what this can tell us about the art. In the spirit of this concern, the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Leach.

Prehistoric rock art increasingly is understood to be embedded in complex cultural systems of social routines, kin networks, economic landscapes, technological change, seasonal population movements, domestic and task-specific foraging behaviors, and variable gendered activities. The Holocene record of occupation and use of the High Rock Country in the Northern Great Basin provides an opportunity to explore such complex contexts of rock art. Rich lithic sources, strategic locations for hunting,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Gifford-Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ascertaining the past existence of fire-based landscape management practices requires the use of multiple lines of geological, arboreal fire scar, pollen and charcoal, archaeobotanical, and faunal evidence. In our initial project in a now-woody valley near the Central California coast, these and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Gorden.

Yokuts and Western Mono tribes of central California had close cultural ties. While the Yokuts were the most numerous and the dominant culture, many people were bilingual. They shared themes in their pictographs, petroglyphs, and cupules, which are cultural traits of a ceremonial nature that are archaeologically identifiable, and are generally agreed to have magico-religious significance. Forty-one percent of the paintings in their territory occur in shallow caves and rockshelters, which vary in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Basin hunter-gatherers procured obsidian from more distant sources during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) than did their Holocene successors, suggesting a more mobile subsistence adaptation. However, this requires annual rounds and logistic forays beyond the scale of ethnographic, pedestrian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, California State University, Los Angeles, began a multi-year investigation of the Rose Valley Site (CA-INY-1799). As an enhancement of our archaeological methodology, my study has emphasized an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates geological research and geospatial technologies. This includes the use of geostatistical analyses, extensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julienne Bernard.

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. This paper examines and celebrates the scholarship of Jeanne Arnold within her life as a friend, colleague, and mentor. Coming of age in a decidedly masculine and sometimes antagonistic era of California archaeology, Jeanne emerged as a leading and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Kaijankoski. Brian Byrd. Michelle Goman. Jack Meyer. Manuel Palacios-Fest.

Situated on the southeast edge of San Francisco, the Islais Creek estuary was infilled during early development of the city. Recent geoarchaeological coring searching for prehistoric sites underlying this urban landscape has documented a complex sequence of Holocene landforms deposited as sea level rise transformed the ancestral Islais Creek valley. This exploratory work also identified, in a variety of stratigraphic contexts, an extensive ancestral Native American shell mound that was occupied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Livingston. Matthew Des Lauriers. Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Baja California is a landscape formed by visually endless coastlines fringing a narrow spine of mountains and deep desert canyons with their hidden oases. The earliest European images presented of this original “California” depicted it as an island, separate from the adjacent continent....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Glassow.

Data derived from oxygen isotope profiles of mussel shells suggest that sites in the interior of Santa Cruz Island dating between 4700 and 3400 cal BC, the period of the island’s "red abalone middens," were occupied during the spring through early winter, with little or no occupation during the main winter months. In contrast, a small number of oxygen isotope profiles indicates that a large costal site was occupied predominantly during the winter and possibly also the fall, with no occupation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Gamble.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Secret societies are groups of individuals that possess esoteric knowledge that is not available to non-members, and therefore are by definition exclusive. Many such societies are associated with administering ritual ceremonies. The Chumash Indians of southern California had a secret society known as...