Aboriginal High Elevation Occupation of the White Mountains, Eastern California

Robert Bettinger

Aboriginal High Elevation Occupation of the White Mountains, Eastern California

Author(s): Robert Bettinger

Year: 2024

Summary

Located in eastern California where they rise abruptly from about 4500 ft to exactly 14,252 ft at the top of White Mountain Peak, the White Mountains feature a variety of natural resources that have attracted hunter-gatherers since the end of the last ice age. The record left by those hunter-gatherers is reported here as the product of archaeological research conducted in the White Mountain alpine zone, above 10,000 ft, between 1982 and the mid-1990s. Excavation and surface collection from 11 village sites, 3 special use sites, and 2 surveys generated a legacy assemblage of aboriginal chipped and ground stone, worked bone and shell, and ceramics and Euroamerican metal, glass, and leather, for which 2669 time sensitive projectile points and bifaces, 71 radiocarbon dates, 171 obsidian hydration dates, and stratigraphic relationship to a layer of volcanic ash, almost certainly the tephra 2 of Wood (1977), dated here to A.D. 775, provided temporal control. Reflected in the White Mountains faunal assemblage and more than 7000 projectile points and 6000 bifaces in the White Mountains lithic assemblage, hunting for Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis) as was the principal motivation from beginning to end. The staging of this hunting changed at A.D. 500, however. Before that, alpine hunting was logistically staged from residential sites on the adjacent valley floor. After that, it was residentially staged, i.e., locally, from White Mountain alpine villages occupied by whole families living in well-built residential structures – 62 in all – supplementing the diet provided by Bighorn with the hunting and trapping of smaller game, principally the Yellowed-bellied Marmot (Marmorata flaviventris) and procurement of alpine seeds and roots as attested by the more than 7000 whole and fragmentary millingstones and more than 6000 whole and fragmentary manos in the White Mountains collection. This shift toward alpine intensification – from logistical to residential alpine use, and widening of diet breadth from more selective emphasis on alpine large game to less selective emphasis on alpine small game and plants – first visibly gained traction between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1000, then gained even greater force after A.D. 1200, matching contemporaneous and similarly sustained adaptive intensification at lower elevations, signaling an historically unrivalled regional trajectory of Great Basin hunter-gatherer population growth that propelled Numic speakers from eastern California up, across, and out of the Great Basin in what is known as the Numic spread.