High Altitude Residence in the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains

Summary

It has been suggested that high elevations are highly demanding environments, poor in resources, and only heavily used to procure high ranked animal prey. In the Great Basin Steward’s work with the Shoshone and Piute showed that valley and foothill resources dominated subsistence patterns with high altitude resources playing only a minor role for hunting. In the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains however, there is evidence of high altitude residential sites in both the White Mountains of eastern California and the Wind River Range of western Wyoming. These sites appear to be anomalous in that they contradict previously held ideas about hunter-gatherer adaptive choices, specifically intensive plant processing in lieu of hunting, evidenced by large quantities of groundstone. Ongoing research seeks to define the use of grinding implements through starch residue and use-wear analysis to better understand hunter-gatherer adaptive choices at high altitude.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage