North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
326-350 (374 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles are often given short thrift in archaeological research and reporting, due in large part to their rarity and thus limited depth of analysis. Recent studies have demonstrated a variety of new analytical techniques, revealing new potential in archaeological and anthropological textile studies. Unfortunately, over ten years into these developments, few...
Theoretically Based Investigations of the Paleo-Indian Occupation of Grass Valley, Nevada (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of human use of the central Great Basin during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) remains unclear. Ongoing archaeological research in Grass Valley, Nevada, focuses on understanding foraging behavior in changing PHT landscapes through expectations of Human Behavioral Ecology and geoarchaeological investigations for defining the extent of...
Thirty Years On, Considering Kelly’s 1988 "Three Sides of A Biface", and Why It Matters for Great Basin Archaeology (2018)
We argue that it is time to reconsider the use of the term biface in Great Basin archaeology and implement more heuristic terms in its place. In most instances, there is only one role or "one side of a biface" and that was to become a projectile point. It is time we recognize bifaces as such and acknowledge that preform morphology can be an indicator of temporal association and of social agents including children. Stage classification alone is limiting in terms of allowing us to broaden our...
Toolstone Acquisition in the Interior of California’s South-Central Coast: Raw Material Extraction in the Mid- to Late Holocene (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of local vs. nonlocal toolstone sources can reveal much about past hunter-gatherer behavior. Toolstone-acquisition-related decisions reflect past people’s settlement strategy—“mapping on” or logistically exploiting a stone resource, raw material quality, and environmental productivity. Our sample of nine sites is an optimal geographic context...
Toward a Nim (Mono) Archeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster is a collaboration in an attempt to create a new archeology rooted in a Native American tradition of the people who created the archeological deposits, based in a Nim sense of time, space and values. Archeologists must get away from the artificial concept of sites, which divides rather than looks for interconnections. We must show respect for...
Trans-Holocene Human Impacts on Endangered California Black Abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) Population Structures: Historical Ecological Management Implications from the Northern Channel Islands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) were an important subsistence resource in southern California for 10,000 years, first for coastal Native Americans, then as a commercial shellfishery. By 1993, however, black abalone populations declined dramatically, resulting in the closure of the California fishery. Recently, black abalone are showing signs of...
Transcending Transects: Research Contexts for a Landscape View of Highway Corridor Archaeology in California. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology within highway corridors is too easily hampered by an inability to adequately address bigger research issues due to the narrow slices of landscapes crossed, access restrictions, project-specific limitations on funding and focus of attention on isolated or smaller pieces of larger archaeological resources. ...
Transforming Orphan Archaeological Collections to Student Theses (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Like many state agencies, California State Parks have been the source of a number of archaeological excavations which generated collections of notes and artifacts. A significant number of these collections were either not fully studied and written up or have material that deserves another look and the preparation of a more formal report. In coordination with...
Trek Up the River: A Cobble Tool Technology as Clue to Interior California's Antiquity (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An early quartzite cobble lithic technology is evidenced by a multi-site pattern of datasets including waste cores and tools with highly patinated flake scars on remains deeply embedded in the natural desert pavement of the Pleistocene shorelines along the Lower Colorado River (LCR). Reduction technology is represented at Vista del Lago (CA-SBr-1456) located...
Trends in Paleoindian Projectile Point Technology during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition at the Old River Bed Delta, UT (2018)
The fossil Old River Bed delta, located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, UT, contains one of the highest concentrations of Paleoindian archaeology within the Great Basin. Occupied from 13,000 cal B.P. until its desiccation around 9,500 cal B.P., this productive marshland provided a wide array of dietary resources utilized by the region’s inhabitants during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. However, changes in climate, local hydrology, and human populations during this dynamic period likely...
Trends in Prehistoric Tool-Stone Use in the Upper Mojave Desert of Eastern 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 upper Mojave Desert of eastern California is bounded by the transverse ranges on the south, the Sierra Nevada on the werst, and the Great Basin on the east and north, and has been utilized by Native peoples since Paleoindian times. Occupation has varied through time due to population movements and resource variability, probably including climatic...
Tribal Consultation: What We Lose When It’s "My way or the highway" (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over my years as Director of the Cultural Rights and Protection Department for the Ute Indian Tribe, I have seen tribal consultation in many different forms. In my presentation, I will be talking about tribal consultation as collaboration and how we can all move...
Tuberculosis Sanatoriums: Historical Archaeology, Landscape, and Identity (2018)
This paper examines the archaeology of the Weimar Joint Sanatorium, an institution which functioned as the county tuberculosis hospital for fifteen counties in California during the early twentieth-century. Field data from topographical survey, historic structures recording, geophysical survey, and surface collection are interpreted along with historical information in order to understand how the institution and people connected to it were situated within the larger landscape. Within the...
The Tunna’ Nosi’ Kaiva’ Gwaa Archaeological District: Prehistoric Communal Hunting and Pine Nut Harvesting (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Set in a mid-elevation pinyon-juniper woodland, Tunna’ Nosi’ Kaiva’ Gwaa (TNKG) archaeological district is located in the north Bodie Hills, Mineral County, Nevada, USA. The prehistoric component includes seven game corrals, 12 drivelines, over 170 rock rings, nine rock art sites, individual and grouped hunting blinds, and concentrations of shattered...
Two Pioneering California Women Archaeologists, 1940s–1960s: Agnes Bierman Babcock and Freddie Curtis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although this may seem surprising, there were very few women California archaeologists prior to the 1940s. This presentation discusses the lives of two pioneering women archaeologists who worked primarily in Southern California from the late 1940s to the 1960s, that of Agnes Bierman...
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Emergency Response Adaptive Management (2019)
This is an abstract from the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A National Perspective on CRM, Research, and Consultation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mission of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (Corps) Regulatory Program is to protect the Nation's aquatic resources while allowing reasonable development through fair and balanced permit decisions. The Corps works with consulting parties to develop appropriate mitigation measures when adverse...
Understanding Prearchaic Mobility and Settlement Patterns: The Role of Theory, Models, and Ethnographic Analogies (2018)
Most evidence suggests that Prearchaic hunter-gatherers were highly mobile, and equipped with a hunting oriented lithic technology that lacked milling equipment. Nonetheless, they acquired a broad spectrum of prey and tended to camp near wetlands rich in small game and plant resources. Archaeologists have questioned to what degree this evidence reflects an adaptation that fundamentally differed from ethnographically observed patterns in the Great Basin, as well as whether it was shaped primarily...
Unpacking the Geoarchaeologist’s Geospatial Tool Bag: A Case Study Using Predictive Modeling on the Central Coast, Pismo Beach, California (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While geographic information system (GIS) based modeling applications are not new to archaeological practice, they offer a suite of tools and techniques for building a robust geoarchaeological dataset when used judiciously. Such models utilize geologic unit and age, soils, slope, aspect, distance to water, distance to known resource procurement areas, or other...
Use It or Lose It: How to Activate Public Stewards to Protect Archaeological Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1996, the SAA enshrined Stewardship as Principle No. 1 for a reason: without stewards of the archaeological record, there is no hope for its long-term preservation. Many of us are satisfied with our own roles as site caretakers, but in Utah, it was not enough. Repeated and dramatic...
The Use of Ancient DNA to Investigate Change in Vole Populations during the Past 7,000 years: Implications for Past Land Management Practices (2019)
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. The integration of genetic research on contemporary and ancient organisms into archaeological studies represents a novel approach in the analysis of long-term landscape management practices by small-scale societies. Our project employs methods in genetics (aDNA, phylogeographic research on...
Using Barn Owl (Tyto alba) Pellets to Build Environmental Profiles: A 1,500-Year-Old Record from Barn Owl Cave, Santa Barbara Island, California, USA (2019)
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. Archaeology has a long history of applying proxy data to reconstruct past environmental conditions. Archaeological deposits, however, represent an anthropocentric view of the past, one biased by human selection and decision-making. This research focuses on excavation and analysis of owl-generated,...
Using Faunal Stable Isotopes to Assess Past Hunting Practices and Landscape Modification Along the Feather River, CA (2018)
Isotopic studies of faunal remains provide an ecological framework from which to interpret human behavior, including diet, subsistence, settlement, and mobility. In this study, we present isotopic analysis of four well-dated sites that span a 3500-year record along the Feather River, the biggest tributary of the Sacramento River located in Northern Central California. Through carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur stable isotopes we explore the effects of human population growth on the type(s) of browse...
Using Fish Remains from Paisley Caves, Oregon to Explore Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways and Lake Level History in the Chewaucan Basin over the Past 14,000+ Calendar Years (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paisley Caves holds some of the earliest evidence for human occupation in North America. The site’s fish remains have received only limited attention before now. Our pilot study sought to assess the potential for using a sample of the fish remains to help reconstruct lake level history, better understand regional paleoenvironments, and gain insights on forager...
Using Landscape Learning to Explore Diachronic Change within the Western Stemmed Tradition (2021)
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. The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) spanned as much as 5,000 years in the Great Basin. However, due to deflationary erosion, more refined control within this wide temporal range remains elusive. Thus, temporally sequencing WST sites, subtypes, and their diagnostic artifacts is currently difficult, often unattainable, and...
Using Lithic Conveyance to Reconstruct Paleoindian Cultural Landscapes in the Great Basin (2018)
Archaeologists commonly use the geographic patterning of sourced artifacts to understand how prehistoric cultures used their landscapes, yet exactly what this patterning indicates remains unclear. The Paleoindian literature reflects a tendency to assume that toolstone conveyance reflects direct acquisition (i.e., mobility) motivated by subsistence and technological concerns, rather than acquisition (i.e., exchange) motivated by social concerns. Yet the challenge of actually distinguishing...