Land Use in the High Desert of Northwestern Nevada: Analyzing Settlement Patterns of the Bare Allotment

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mobility has long been seen as a key strategy for foragers in marginal environments, where movement around the landscape sought to take advantage of natural resources that often have narrow windows of availability. While mobility has often focused solely on obsidian conveyance in the Great Basin, ethnographic accounts suggest that food resources were more scarce and more influential to migration routes and timing. This study explores the land use strategies employed by prehistoric populations within the Bare Allotment, a BLM managed land located between Surprise Valley and Black Rock Canyon in northwestern Nevada. Our dataset includes a combination of over 100 records of existing and newly documented sites with chronological diagnostic markers spanning from the Paleoarchaic to the Late Prehistoric Periods. We explore the relationship between site locations and natural resources to develop a fine-grained analysis of land use and how it changed over time. The results of this study have the potential to contribute to our understanding of land use mobility patterns within this area, but also to the region as a whole.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25763