Great Basin (Other Keyword)
1-25 (35 Records)
CA-SBR-14 is a rock shelter site located in the South Range of Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS), China Lake in the west central Mojave Desert. Subsurface investigation of the site has provided important contextual data that challenges previous interpretations of prehistoric use of the area. Artifacts collected include milling slabs on the surface of the site, fire-affected fragments that were recovered from subsurface test units, and three handstones that appear to have been deliberately placed...
A Biface Cache from Paradise Springs, Central Mojave Desert (2015)
A cache of eight pressure-flaked bifaces, including two Humboldt Basal-Notched knives of Coso obsidian and six, chert, dart-point performs, was found at Paradise Springs, south of Fort Irwin in the Central Mojave Desert. Hydration rinds on the two Humboldt bifaces indicate that the cache dates to about 1400 cal BP. The function of the cache within its social context, the special role of the Humboldt Basal-Notched knife, and the persistence of the altatl and dart into bow and arrow times are...
Bighorn Sheep Processing in the White Mountains, California (2015)
Previous research in the eastern Great Basin using stable isotope analysis of faunal remains suggests that bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) responded to climate change by shifting their ranges to higher elevations during warm intervals. A shift in sheep ranges would have increased travel and transportation costs for central place foragers based in lower elevation valleys. We expect that hunters responded to the increased costs in a number of ways, including altering settlement strategies and...
Continuing the Search for Pre-Clovis Aged Cutmarked Bones in the Great Basin: Recent Results (2016)
Hockett and Jenkins (2013) suggested that two bones directly AMS dated prior to the Clovis era (ca. > 13,100 calendar years ago) recovered from the Paisley Caves, Oregon, displayed stone tool cutmarks. Since this publication, additional bones were identified as possibly exhibiting cutmarks from Paisley Cave #2. In addition, in the 1950’s Phil Orr recovered a number of burned large mammal bones from Pleistocene-aged deposits in several caves flanking the eastern margins of the Winnemucca Lake...
Digital Data Collection, D-Stretch And Databases: New Approaches To Recording Rock Art In Lincoln County (2015)
A BLM-funded rock art recordation project recently undertaken in Lincoln County, Southern Nevada has focused on three Areas of Environmental Concern: Mount Irish, Shooting Gallery and Pahroc. The overall Project was designed to be a comprehensive heritage inventory of all archaeological evidence in these Areas, and based on a systematic sample there are close to 700 recorded sites in these areas of which around 200 contain rock art. Building on earlier work by the Nevada Rock Art Foundation and...
Divergent Histories: Prehistoric Use of Alpine Habitats in the Toquima and Toiyabe Ranges, Central Great Basin (2015)
Alpine villages are extremely rare in the Great Basin. To date, villages located at elevations above 10,000 ft. are only known to occur in the White Mountains and the Toquima Range. Demographic forcing and climatic change has been used to explain the existence of these villages, but these propositions do not identify more specific selective pressures that led to the establishment of high-elevation villages in some ranges but not others. Comparison of artifact distributions and environmental...
Embedded Activities: Preliminary Analysis of Landscape Use and Mobility Patterns in Colorado National Monument (2015)
Ongoing archaeological survey of Colorado National Monument, located on the eastern edge of the Colorado Plateau, reveals that much of the area is a continuous landscape of non-discrete lithic scatters with light to dense concentrations of artifacts. The ephemerality of many of the sites, coupled with their lack of distinct boundaries, poses a challenge for understanding landscape use and mobility patterns of the hunting and gathering people who utilized the area. To circumvent this issue we...
From Dirt to Behavior: An Introduction (2016)
This paper presents an introduction to the life and times of David B. Madsen and a collection of presentations that celebrate his significant contributions. Perhaps best known for his unparalleled investigations of Great Basin paleoecology and Fremont period farmers and foragers, Madsen’s voluminous and enduring record also includes books and articles on late Pleistocene-Holocene paleontology, the peopling of North America, the Asian Upper Paleolithic and the transition to agriculture, the...
Gear Selectivity and Mass Harvested Minnows: Evidence from the Northern Great Basin (2016)
Madsen and Schmitt’s seminal 1998 article challenged the assumption that small animals and fish in archaeological assemblages of the Great Basin provides evidence for diminished foraging efficiency. Energetic return rates for density dependent species instead may be a function of harvesting technique. The Northern Paiute of the Great Basin exploited seasonally aggregated tui chub minnows (Gila bicolor) using gill nets, seines and scoops. This study presents a simulated mass harvesting experiment...
A Geospatial Analysis of Northern Side-notched points in the Northern Great Basin: A Case Study from the Burns District Bureau of Land Management (2016)
In the northern Great Basin region of eastern Oregon, little is understood about human settlement during the hot, dry middle Holocene. The only diagnostic piece of material culture which reliably dates to this period is the Northern Side-notched (NSN) projectile point, which was last studied extensively by John Fagan in 1974. The purpose of this study is to reconsider Fagan’s interpretations of Altithermal occupations in the northern Great Basin - specifically whether such sites are limited to...
Haskett Spear Points and the Plausibility of Megafaunal Hunting in the Great Basin (2015)
Recent Haskett projectile point finds from western Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert provide a compelling case for megafaunal hunting in the Great Basin, a region that stands out in North America for its lack of direct evidence. The Haskett style is likely the oldest representative of the Western Stemmed series of projectile points, and radiocarbon age estimates on black mat organics at the locality suggest a date range between ca. 12,000 and 13,000 cal BP. In this paper, an argument for megafaunal...
Human Response to Environmental Change during the Early/Mid Holocene in the Great Basin: Frame of Reference in Comparative Perspective (2016)
At the transition from Early to Middle Holocene, the Great Basin witnessed higher effective temperatures and reduced aquatic resource zones. Intensified use of terrestrial plants, reflected by the Middle Holocene appearance of milling equipment, is an archaeological signature of the transition, but the relative importance of terrestrial fauna and aquatic resources under either climatic regime remains unclear. Here we use Binford’s environmental frames of reference to model regional Early and...
Hunter-Gatherer Canid Petroglyphs in the Wind River and Bighorn Basins of Wyoming (2001)
Big game, large bird, and canid (dog/wolf/coyote) figures are the most obvious zoomorph petroglyph motifs in the Bighorn and Wind River Basins. Canid petroglyph motifs, with many apparently dating 2000-6000 B.P., or possibly older, tend to prevail in specific areas of the southern Bighorn and northeastern Wind River Basins. The geographic distribution of these canid motifs appears to be more than coincidental. Examination of known/recorded Wind River and Bighorn Basin canid motif petroglyph...
Is Bigger Always Better? Body-Size, Prey Rank, and Hunting Technology (2015)
Zooarchaeological applications of rationale derived from the Prey Choice Model (PCM) are based on the assumption that prey body-size is a robust proxy for prey rank and post-encounter return rate. The PCM predicts dietary expansion and contraction in response to the encounter rates with large-sized and highly ranked game. In zooarchaeological assemblages, co-variation in the abundances of large and small-sized prey are often viewed as reflecting changes in foraging efficiency and are usually...
James F. O’Connell and Great Basin Archaeology (2015)
Jim O’Connell began his professional career in anthropology as a Berkeley graduate student under Robert Heizer, conducting his dissertation (1971) research on the prehistory of Surprise Valley in NE California. A teaching position at UC Riverside (1970-72) was soon supplanted by a research fellowship (1973-78) in Prehistory at Australian National University during which he pursued ethnoarchaeological research among the Alyawara. In 1978, he joined the Anthropology Department at the University of...
Lithic Technological Organization at Last Supper Cave: Reconstructing Paleoindian Mobility and Landscape Use at an Upland Site in Northwestern Nevada (2015)
Excavations at Last Supper Cave (LSC), Nevada by Tom Layton and Jonathan Davis in the early 1970s revealed an extensive record of occupation including a Paleoindian component recently re-dated to ~10,300 14C B.P. Despite the potential for the site to reveal information about Paleoindian lifeways in the Great Basin during the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene (TP/EH), analysis of these early artifacts, including numerous Great Basin stemmed projectile points, tools, and debitage, was never...
Numic Fire: Biogeography of Foragers and Fire in the Great Basin (2015)
Fire is increasingly recognized as a central evolutionary force shaping the earth’s ecosystems. This is especially observable in the fire-prone American West, where indigenous populations frequently used low-intensity burns to modify their habitats for myriad purposes. Given the variability of environments within the Great Basin, the effects of anthropogenic burning likely had different impacts depending on local ecological and subsistence contexts. To understand where and why anthropogenic...
On the Trail of the Stemmed Point: A Circum-Pacific Perspective (2017)
Half a century ago, Alan Bryan proposed that two distinct early Paleoindian traditions occurred in North America—Clovis Fluted east of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin Stemmed in the far west—and that these co-traditions potentially represented different founding migrations from the Old World, with Great Basin Stemmed potentially being tied to a coastal north Pacific route. Much of the research that Ruth Gruhn and her partner Bryan conducted during the next several decades, certainly into the...
An overview of cultural resources monitoring at the Nevada National Security Site (2017)
An integral component of the cultural resources management program at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) is the monitoring of cultural resources that have been determined eligible to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). The Desert Research Institute periodically conducts field evaluations of these cultural resources in order to document their condition and note any deterioration due to natural processes or unauthorized activities. NRHP eligible properties at the NNSS include...
Paleoarchaic Occupations in the Eastern Great Basin: Results of GIS Predictive Modeling for Identifying Paleoarchaic Sites in Southern Nevada (2015)
Within the Great Basin, site locations dating to the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) are generally associated with specific geographical features. GIS is a useful tool for identifying geographical features likely to contain sites dating to the PHT period. Guided by previous Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene investigations in the Great Basin, a GIS predictive model combining topographical features likely to have been favorable for PHT period occupation was developed. Topographical features...
Paleoindian Lithic Conveyance and Land-Use in the Northwestern Great Basin: A Summary of the Current Evidence (2017)
For more than a decade, the University of Nevada, Reno has conducted archaeological survey in the northwestern Great Basin, searching for Paleoindian sites under the auspices of the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit (formerly the Sundance Archaeological Research Fund). Our work has identified a rich record of early occupation in southeastern Oregon and northwestern Nevada. Additionally, we have reanalyzed existing collections of Paleoindian artifacts from Last Supper Cave and Hanging...
Perishable Artifacts from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter (26EK3682), Nevada: A Technological Analysis of Artifacts from the Early through Late Holocene (2016)
Bonneville Estates Rockshelter (26EK3682) in Elko County, Nevada, is a stratified multi-component site on the western edge of the Bonneville Basin excavated between 2000-2009. The shelter has produced hundreds of perishable artifacts spanning from the early Archaic to historic periods, and it provides an excellent opportunity to examine perishable technology diachronically throughout the Holocene in the eastern Great Basin. This poster presents the results of a complete analysis of all...
PLANT RESOURCES IN GREAT BASIN HIGH ALTITUDE FORAGING (2015)
Prehistoric high altitude occupation sites in the White Mountains and Toquima Range contain archaeobotanical assemblages that inform on the use of plant resources both alpine in origin and imported from lower altitudes. Plant assemblages from the two areas show many similarities in the range of plant resources represented, as well as evident differences that reflect variable modes of high altitude living across the Great Basin. This presentation compares the plant materials from the White...
Pottery at Skull Creek Dunes, OR and Its Implications for Pottery Tradition in Southeastern Oregon (2018)
Prehistoric pottery is rare in Oregon, and the presence of pottery at the Skull Creek Dunes site in Catlow Valley of Southern Oregon is potentially important. This paper builds on the previous excavation and research by Scott Thomas of the Burns BLM and describes the pottery and work done on it since. These sherds represent one of the oldest pottery traditions in Oregon, and were likely made on site. Initial dating places the site around 1250 CE. In addition to the sherds, small possible gaming...
The Pre-Mazama Occupation of the LSP-1 Rockshelter, Warner Valley, Oregon (2015)
For the past five years, a crew from the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit, University of Nevada, Reno, has excavated in the LSP-1 Rockshelter in Warner Valley, Oregon. Our work has identified a modest record of pre-Mazama (~7,700 cal BP) occupation comprised of lithic tools and debitage, a well-preserved faunal assemblage, shell beads, and hearth features. In this paper, we highlight major trends in the LSP-1 assemblage and place it within the broader context of northern Great Basin...