North America: California and Great Basin (Other Keyword)
1-25 (79 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The completion of an archaeological field school continues to be one of the main qualifying criteria for employment in the broader realm of cultural resource management. Yet costs associated with participation in either domestic or international programs keep increasing. Moreover, 4-6 week full-time field schools pose additional challenges regarding...
Analyzing an Historic-Era Refuse Deposit at Crystal Cove State Park, Orange County, California (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the last 100 years the coastal landscape now designated as Crystal Cove State Park has seen overlapping usage by various communities. These include the Hollywood campers of the 1920s, the Japanese and Japanese-American farming communities of the 1930s, the abrupt takeover of the Coast Guard in the 1940s, and the more recent visitors and state park...
Applying Behavioral Ecology to Help Restore Indigenous Socioenvironmental Systems in the Bear River Basin (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous land-use decisions influenced plants and animals across North America for thousands of years. These dynamics were disrupted by settler-colonial invasions, leading to declines in ecosystem function and health. Restoring Indigenous socioenvironmental systems and the cultural keystone species they support requires first identifying how...
Are Mountains Marginal? (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountain environments, the treeless parts above 10,000 ft specifically, are traditionally viewed as less productive, more difficult of access, more physiologically challenging, and for those reasons, marginal to their subalpine counterparts. The ideal free distribution (IFD) of Fretwell and Lucas (1969) provides a means of testing this “marginal...
The Auburn Chinese Joss House: An Analysis of an Artifact Collection through Descendant Community Collaboration (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The Auburn Joss House Chinese History Museum is one of the few remaining structures from the mid-19<sup>th</sup> to 20<sup>th</sup>-century Chinatown in Auburn, California — a prominent gold rush town. A man named Charles Yue opened it as the Ling Ying Association building in the 1920s to be used as a temple, boardinghouse, Chinese language and...
Bison Leap Lore: Layered Landscapes and Legacies - A GIS Investigation of the Owl Cave Early Holocene Bison Jump in Southern Idaho (2025)
This is an abstract from the "From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the evidence suggests bison were consistently taken by indigenous hunters on the eastern Snake River Plain throughout the Holocene, quantitative faunal analyses indicate that bison were taken in modest numbers. Contrasting this pattern,...
Buffalo's Little Brother Hill: A Little Ice Bison Jump in Southern Idaho (2025)
This is an abstract from the "From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates whether Buffalo’s Little Brother Hill (10BT2303) functioned as a bison jump using GIS analysis. To assess whether the site could have been utilized as a jump we examined the upland topography and conducted a...
The "Cable Boom": Public Transportation and the Cityscape of 1880s Los Angeles (2025)
This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> <b>The development of mass transit played an integral role in the development of cities in the 19</b><sup><b>th</b></sup><b> century American West. In particular, the rapid expansion of population in 1880s Los Angeles created complex interconnections between land development,...
Captive Baskets: Contemporary Indigenous History of California Basket Collecting and Repatriation Policy (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The vast majority of baskets in Californian collections were woven in the past 150 years and yet they are often displayed as separate from their contemporary histories; posed as ahistorical relics of a static imagined past. Rather, basket collections as social beings contain a contemporary past that is fraught with the realities of settler colonialism,...
Cephasylogy and "Trophy Heads" in Fremont Culture (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Images of the Uinta Fremont (A.D. 0 - 1300)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presence of flayed scalps, severed heads, and ears (henceforth referred to as cephasiles) preserved in the archaeological record of the Southwest United States suggest a greater diversity in significance than simply a status-granting warrior’s symbol, as previously thought. In this paper the author makes an argument in favor of three...
Classic Vernal Style Necklaced Anthropomorphs: Continuity and Change, AD 500-1300 (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Images of the Uinta Fremont (A.D. 0 - 1300)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Northern Uinta Basin Rock Image Recording Project (NURIRP) documents 451 anthropomorphs representing an array of attributes, most importantly necklace types. In this presentation, I identify three sub-styles of CVS anthros wearing necklaces: (1) seven variants of a solid-pecked or abraded “collar” necklace, often with a vertical midline...
Classic Vernal Style Shield-bearers in Uinta Fremont Iconography (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Images of the Uinta Fremont (A.D. 0 - 1300)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent decades, scholarship about pre-contact Plains and Pueblo shields have referenced a region in Utah’s Uinta Basin that is seemingly a hot spot for shield iconography among the Fremont (A.D. 300 - 1300). The rock imagery classification of Classic Vernal Style makes room for shields and shield-bearers as possibly a variant located in...
Communities of Practice, Past and Present: An Examination of Precontact, Historic, and Modern Uses of Public Lands and Situated Learning in the Central Great Basin USA (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent Class III Cultural Resources Inventory of over 53 square miles Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in the central Great Basin within Pluvial Lake Newark and the Pancake Range has resulted in the documentation of over 650 archaeological sites. These include large-scale pronghorn traps, residential camps, and toolstone quarries dating from the...
Construction Zones: Understanding Space at an Early Twentieth-Century Western Work Camp (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Associated with canal construction on the Powell Tract of the Big Lost River Irrigation (Carey Act) Project, a network of work camps is situated entirely within the bounds of the present-day Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in southeastern Idaho. The largest of these work camps are characterized by a large artifact assemblage and the presence of at least...
The Conveyance of Paleoindian Toolstone to Pluvial Lake Mojave, California (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study uses pXRF technology to delineate the conveyance of terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene obsidian and fine-grained volcanic (FGV) toolstone and artifacts to pluvial Lake Mojave, California. Prior preliminary research indicates Paleoindians conveyed nonlocal Coso Volcanic Field (CVF) obsidian and Goldstone dacite to Lake Mojave from the northwest...
Developing a Methodology for the Identification of Shell Bead Money in the Archaeological Record (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is evidence for the use of shell bead money by hunter-gatherer communities dating back at least 2000 years, yet there has been little research done on this topic. In her recent paper, Dr. Lynn H Gamble (2020) draws from anthropological theory about money, ethnographic records, and bead morphology from Chumash sites in southern California to develop...
Dietary Trends through Time at the Phoenix Powerhouse Site: A Stable Isotope Perspective (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phoenix Powerhouse site has a 4,700-year history of use by Native peoples inhabiting the western slope of the central Sierra Nevada mountains in California. The site, currently managed by PG&E, has yielded human, faunal, and charred plant macrofossil remains during archaeological mitigation and investigation. At the request of the Tuolumne Me-Wuk and...
Drought, population pressure, and inequality drive inter-group conflict in the precontact U.S. Southwest (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To anticipate relationships between future climate change and societal violence, we need theory to establish causal links and case studies to estimate interactions between driving forces. Here, we couple theory from human behavioral ecology with a machine learning approach to investigate the long-term effects of climate change, population size,...
Dual Frontier Feminism: Using Feminist Archaeology to Explore Expressions of Feminism at Early Twentieth-Century Reno Divorce Ranches (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early twentieth century, women from around the world traveled to Reno, Nevada to dissolve their marriages. Required to reside in the state for six weeks, many divorce seekers spent their tenure at an accommodation unique to Nevada: the Reno divorce ranch. Divorce ranches were liminal spaces where women pushed the boundaries of gender and embraced...
Ecosystem Control and Costly Signaling: An Integrated Analysis of Holocene Hunting in the Bonniville and Wyoming Basins, USU (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore and integrate different currencies that may underlie large-game hunting to guide a trans-Holocene analysis of variation in artiodactyl utilization using archaeofaunal data-sets from predominantly open-air sites from the Bonneville and Wyoming basins. The available empirical data continue to suggest that artiodactyls yield consistently...
Engendering Archeology at the Grandad Site: An Attempt to Differentiate Women’s and Men’s Space Based on Archeological Data (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Grandad site is located in the Sierra Foothills of California. CSU-Fresno has conducted a field school there for over 25 years. Since 2006 we have focused on two areas, a Chief's House (male area) and a Chaw'se or BRM (female area). One of the recent theoretical approaches in archeology has been Engendering Archeology. Having taught this theory in my...
Ethnicity and the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad in Nevada (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On January 30, 1905 in an inauspicious, unmarked location in the Nevada desert, a momentous event occurred: the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad crews completed the “Salt Lake Route” between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Los Angeles, California. The railroad’s construction, controversial largely because of competition between two rival...
Examining the Commercial District of Aurora, Nevada (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of precious metals in the American West generated unparalleled interest in the extractive industry during the mid to late nineteenth century. The allure of possible riches, or at least a way to provide for oneself and family, brought diverse peoples to the mining towns of the West. Mining town populations predominantly were men of varied...
Explaining Differential Settlement Patterning in the Sierra Nevada (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Different ethnolinguistic groups in the Sierra Nevada exhibit substantial variability in settlement patterning, particularly in the intensity of their use of montane and alpine environments. Due to the similarity of environments throughout the range, these differences are not readily attributable to differences in environment or environmental...
FGV Sources of the Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on the geochemistry and archaeological exploitation of fine-grained volcanic (FGV) lithic sources of the greater Great Salt Lake Desert (GSLD) in northwestern Utah. Regional volcanism during the Tertiary is responsible for recurring tectonic activity and normal faulting, and this geology holds a variety of toolstone sources that...