Trends in Prehistoric Tool-Stone Use in the Upper Mojave Desert of Eastern California

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The upper Mojave Desert of eastern California is bounded by the transverse ranges on the south, the Sierra Nevada on the werst, and the Great Basin on the east and north, and has been utilized by Native peoples since Paleoindian times. Occupation has varied through time due to population movements and resource variability, probably including climatic effects. Tool-stone resources include extensive sources of obsidian and fine-grained volcanic along the Sierra Nevada front, plus widespread sources of cryptocrystalline silicates in the desert itself. We assembled a dataset of approximately 3,500 temporally sensitive projectile points from 537 sites in the region, and aggregated them in terms of eight subregions. These data are correlated with approximately 4,000 obsidian hydration dating (OHD) ages from 160 sites in the same subregions. We present data for each subregion, showing the total number of artifacts present, the variation of artifact count with time, correlation with OHD ages, and the material use trends with time. Which tool-stone resources were utilized at any site was probably conditioned by availability and accessibility, including transport costs. Finally we comment on issues arising from using artifact counts to infer population in times of radical changes in hunting technology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35527.0