Variability in Annual Precipitation and Temperature in Northwest Nevada's High Rock Country and its Potential Influence on Western Stemmed Tradition Settlement Strategies and Land Use.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Northwestern Nevada’s High Rock Country features a robust record of late Pleistocene and early Holocene human occupation. Sites with Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) assemblages occur in caves and rockshelters, along stream channels, and around the margins of pluvial lake basins. In this paper, we use historic annual precipitation and temperature data to consider variability within the environments that early groups frequented, focusing on the seasons in which locations may have been optimally occupied and the foods that people may have targeted. Our results provide new insight into the exploration and settlement processes that may have characterized the early chapters of human history in the High Rock Country.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51228