Taking A Shot At Late 19th c. Indigenous Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper looks at identifying and characterizing late 19th century sites occupied by the Western Shoshone in northern Nevada’s (USA) Great Basin Desert. Much of the regional literature on ethnohistoric sites focuses on identifying early contact sites, which for the Great Basin begin around the 1840s, and the mixing of certain ‘prehistoric’ and ‘historic’-era artifacts. However, research aimed at later-era ethnohistoric sites note an increased blurring of traditional ethnic markers, making indigenous sites harder to identify and separate from sites occupied by Euro-Americans. For example, one researcher noted a near-complete absence of debitage on ethnohistoric sites dating after 1880. I focus on three regions in north-central Nevada with a rich collection of ethnohistoric sites and highlight one particular artifact as an example of this blurring and how it reflects on larger changes to traditional indigenous lifeways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow