Wilderness, Wildlife, and Management Misconceptions: Archaeology in Washakie Wilderness NW Wyoming

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since 2002 the Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) project has undertaken an artifact-based, landscape-scale inventory in the eastern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, on the Shoshone National Forest in NW Wyoming. Much of the project has been conducted in the Washakie Wilderness and has focused on elevations >2,500 m. When the project began, both the archaeological community and federal land managers tended to operate under the assumption that past human use of these remote and high elevation landscapes would have been largely ephemeral and left a sparse archaeological record. Over the 21 field seasons, GRSLE has documented over 230,000 artifacts in multiple inventory blocks totaling 3931 ha. Diagnostic artifacts range from Clovis and Folsom points to glass trade beads and metal arrow points. Archaeological data clearly demonstrate that since the Late Pleistocene, humans have been a key component of these wilderness areas with impacts to most other components of the ecosystem. Rather than yielding a sparse, ephemeral record, the project documents the long-term ecological connection of humans with areas today considered pristine or untrammeled and strongly suggests that management planning that omits human engagement with the system is based on a serious misconception of past landscape dynamics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36210.0