How to Tell a Footprint from a Hole in the Ground: Ichnofacies of the Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology Within the Context of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Today (Part One)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The basins of paleolakes in the Desert West preserve an amazing archaeological record. Under certain conditions this archaeological record includes the contemporaneous trackways of humans and animals, these compelling, tactile features connecting people to landscapes across time. The discovery and study of trackways on the Old River Bed delta in the Bonneville basin of western Utah is a geoarchaeological story long in the making. It benefits from decades of CRM-driven survey, excavation, and mapping of a vast archaeological record and deltaic landforms on lands managed by Hill Air Force Base and Dugway Proving Grounds. It benefits further from our being wrong, occasionally, rearranging our interpretations, learning from others, and going back to study the same localities repeatedly. We present the geoarchaeological setting – stratigraphic, taphonomic, and chronologic – of a late Younger Dryas ichnofacies on the Old River Bed delta as people made use of an expanding deltaic wetland while watching a huge lake disappear.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Geoarchaeology Within the Context of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Today (Part One)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51403