Communities of Practice, Past and Present: An Examination of Precontact, Historic, and Modern Uses of Public Lands and Situated Learning in the Central Great Basin USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A recent Class III Cultural Resources Inventory of over 53 square miles Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in the central Great Basin within Pluvial Lake Newark and the Pancake Range has resulted in the documentation of over 650 archaeological sites. These include large-scale pronghorn traps, residential camps, and toolstone quarries dating from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene Paleoarchaic period to the Protohistoric period. Evidence of charcoal production done to fuel smelters in support of mining activities in mid to late nineteenth century along with evidence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ranching and transportation infrastructure was also documented. The latest proposed use of these public lands is a large-scale wind farm for renewable energy production. This paper explores the concepts of Communities of Practice and Situated Learning in which the people who created these sites shared common concerns, sets of problems, and interests, and came together to fulfill both individual and group goals through active participation and social interaction. The establishment of modern CRM communities of practice and situated learning is critical to the proper documentation of these cultural resources and the accurate evaluation of their historical significance and provides a nexus between past and present communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53946