Underwater Geoarchaeology of Perennial Lakes in the Great Basin

Summary

Underwater archaeology in the Great Basin has been generally ignored because underwater researchers often do not associate this desert with inundated environments. Despite this misconception, many large lakes, marshlands, and rivers are found throughout the region. For instance, northern Nevada includes 168 sizable man-made perennial reservoirs that partially or completely cover 188 known sites. In addition, during the late Pleistocene large lakes of fluctuating size covered many of the valleys across the Great Basin. Though most are now dry, a select number of natural lakes remain that have been neglected with respect to underwater archaeology. Research in and around three of these, Malheur Lake, Eagle Lake, and Walker Lake, began in the summer of 2014. Terrestrial and underwater survey, cores, and cutbank stratigraphy reveal the potential for buried site preservation within and around these lakes. These data also allow for predictive modeling of site locations and thus a controlled subsurface testing program. Since most open air sites in the Great Basin are found in surface context, identifying buried sites around these lakes has the potential to vastly improve our understanding of temporal changes in adaptive land use around Great Basin lakes.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Geoarchaeology of Submerged, Intertidal, And Wetland Places: Advances In Method And Theory of Prehistoric Archaeology Underwater 2015 -- Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage