Illuminating High Elevation Seasonal Occupational Duration in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Using Patterning in Lithic Raw Materials and Tool Types

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recent years, our understanding of high elevation landscapes’ potential contribution to prehistoric foragers’ seasonal rounds has developed significantly. This paper advances that understanding further by offering a method for estimating relative occupational duration through time for high elevation landscapes. Using assemblages from the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we measure lithic diversity, both in terms of tool types and raw materials, to consider how and why foragers adjusted their seasonal rounds through time. Ultimately, we find that the major drought known as the Early Holocene Warming correlates with the most extended high elevation occupations in the Beartooth Mountains, while the Absaroka Mountains experienced their longest occupational durations during the Middle Archaic, when the climate had ameliorated. Indeed climate, in general, does not clearly correlate with high elevation occupational duration. In addition, we consider the potential impacts of the Numic Expansion, an influx of Shoshone people from the Great Basin whose timing is much debated. In the Absarokas, the increase in obsidian use at high elevations may indicate Numic arrival during the Middle Archaic, while patterns of occupational duration in the Beartooths register no clear disruption to signal the Numic Expansion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25888