University of Utah Anthropological Paper – serie

This descriptive report on the 1975 archaeological excavations at Cowboy Cave, an Archaic site located in Wayne County, Utah, provides relevant comparative and interpretive comments by a number of authors.

This volume is compilation of individual papers from the Great Basin/California Pottery Workshop of April 1983. The papers include data reports, literature reviews, statements of theoretical positions, and analytical methodology. All address ceramics, primarily of undecorated wares, from the Great Basin and nearby areas.

This paper is the first of two volumes presenting the ethnographic field notes of Willard Z. Parks, who studied the Northern Paiute from 1933 to 1940.

Cultural Resource Management (CRM) refers to the discovery, evaluation, and preservation of culturally significant sites, focusing on but not limited to archaeological and historical sites of significance. CRM stems from the National Historic Preservation Act, passed in 1966. In 1986, archaeologists reviewed the practice of CRM in the Great Basin. They concluded that it was mainly a system of finding, flagging, and avoiding— a means of keeping sites and artifacts safe. Success was measured by counting the number of sites recorded and acres surveyed.This volume provides an updated review some thirty years later. The product of a 2016 symposium, its measures are the increase in knowledge obtained through CRM projects and the inclusion of tribes, the general public, industry, and others in the discovery and interpretation of Great Basin prehistory and history. Revealing both successes and shortcomings, it considers how CRM can face the challenges of the future. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives, covering highway archaeology, inclusion of Native American tribes, and the legacy of the NHPA, among other topics.

This volume is dedicated to studies of plainwares—the undecorated ceramics that make up the majority of prehistoric ceramic assemblages worldwide. Early analyses of ceramics focused on changes in decorative design elements to establish chronologies and cultural associations. With the development of archaeometric techniques that allow direct dating of potsherds and identification of their elemental composition and residues, plainwares now provide a new source of information about the timing, manufacture, distribution, and use of ceramics.This book investigates plainwares from the far west, stretching into the Great Basin and the northwestern and southwestern edges of Arizona. Contributors use and explain recent analytical methods, including neutron activation, electron microprobe analysis, and thin-section optical mineralogy. They examine native ceramic traditions and how they were influenced by the Spanish mission system, and they consider the pros and cons of past approaches to ware typology, presenting a vision of how plainware analysis can be improved by ignoring the traditional “typological” approach of early ceramicists working with decorated wares.This work provides a much-needed update to plainware studies, with new hypotheses and data that will help set the stage for future research.

The Sacramento Valley of northern California was a rich, diverse environment that supported some of the densest populations of nonagricultural people in the world. Periodic flooding, however, has buried much of the valley’s deep cultural history under alluvium. This volume shares the discovery of four buried archaeological sites, including one dating to 7,000 years ago, filled with a diversified assemblage of artifacts and a rich assortment of food remains. Stone net sinkers and associated fish bones represent the oldest fishery ever documented in the interior of California, while items such as marine shell beads and exotic obsidian, and some of the oldest charmstones ever recovered in California provide evidence for long-distance trade networks. The other three sites date between 4000 and 300 years ago and reflect increasing human population density, technological innovation, and the rise of sedentism and territoriality. This historical sequence culminated in findings from a 400- to 300-year-old house complex probably occupied by the Mechoopda Indian Tribe, who collaborated with the authors throughout the project.

This volume tracks 13,000 years of environmental and cultural change in North Warner Valley—part of the Oregon Desert that has largely escaped researchers’ attention. The authors present a decade of fieldwork and laboratory analyses that reveal a record of human activity that waxed and waned with local and regional environmental and social change. Open-air sites, lithic technology, plant and animal foods, and bone and shell objects—most from a stratified rockshelter record that spans almost ten millennia—tell a story of people who visited North Warner Valley periodically to collect marsh plants, rabbits, and other resources.Smith and colleagues present their work in a way that allows readers to understand not only how people adapted to local change but also how North Warner Valley fit into the complex mosaic of precontact history in the American West. This research is the most comprehensive work conducted in the northern Great Basin in more than two decades. Its multidisciplinary nature should interest students of natural and cultural history, archaeology, and Indigenous lifeways.

As pioneering hunter-gatherer populations moved into unfamiliar regions, they faced the challenge of locating critical resources like food, water, and raw materials for tools, shelter, and clothing. While their descendants would eventually benefit from the accumulation of this knowledge over time, these first colonizers were forced to learn a new landscape from scratch. In Landscape Learning in the Pleistocene Great Basin, David B. Hunt proposes a quantitative model to explain the adaptive behaviors of the first groups of humans to settle in a particular area, a concept known as “landscape learning.”Hunt seeks insight into the initial development of adaptive strategies related to the procurement of essential resources within a region. Incorporating data from archaeological investigation at the Old River Bed Delta in Utah and focusing specifically on the lithics recovered, Hunt develops what he terms the Discoverability Model. He proposes this model as a way for archaeologists to begin quantifying the qualitative aspects of colonization and landscape learning models.