Great Basin Prehistory: A Review

Abstract

Since the Publication of Steward's interpretations of Great Basin prehistory, which were based upon field research ending about 1935, no attempt has been made in published form to collate and analyze currently available data on the full range of the prehistory of the area. Steward's conclusions are thoughtful and represent conservative, sound reasoning upon the basis of the data available and the theories current at the time. As might reasonably be expected, however, subsequent findings have cast doubt upon some of his interpretations and have made others unacceptable. This paper is a brief attempt, deliberately kept at a general level, to review both old and new data, with special reference to the cultural relationships between the Great Basin and San Juan Anasazi, and to call attention to current developments and problems.

The Concept of an Altithermal Cultural Hiatus in Northern Plains Prehistory

“…1972 er (1958) took a similar position. In contrast, while Jennings (Jennings and Norbeck 1955;Jennings 1957) saw n o cultural hiatus, he postulated, on the basis of the hypothesized nature of the Altithermal climate (Antevs 1955) and the similarities between sites such as the McKean site in northeastern Wyoming (Mulloy 1954) and Danger Cave (Jennings 1957) in the Great Basin, that the Great Basin Desert culture was characteristic of the plains during the Altithermal.…”

Doing Great Basin archaeology recently: Coping with variability

“…Steward (1938) was perhaps the first to point out in a systematic way how many aboriginal Great Basin peoples had compensated for the marginal productivity of their environment through seasonal movement. Jennings, in various versions of the "Desert Culture/Archaic" hypothesis (Jennings, 1957(Jennings, , 1964(Jennings, , 1968Jennings and Norbeck, 1955), convincingly argued that this pattern extended back to the earliest occupation of the Great Basin. Acceptance of that idea, and its logical implication that such patterns could not be studied by excavating "type sites," no matter how rich (Thomas, 1973), caused a generation of Great Basin archaeologists to conduct, during the late 1960s and 1970s, probabilistic surface surveys aimed at documenting regional subsistence-settlement patterns (Aikens et al, 1982;Bettinger, 1977;O'Connell, 1975;Thomas, 1973;Weide, 1974).…”

“…In one view, marshes are resource-rich oases that supported enclaves of sedentary or semisedentary wetland specialists distinct in many respects from the mobile resource generalists often pictured as more typical of the Great Basin (Heizer and Napton, 1970;Jennings and Norbeck, 1955;Madsen, 1982;Madsen and Berry, 1974). Thomas (1985Thomas ( , pp.…”

Hunter-gatherer adaptations and environmental change in the southern Great Basin: The evidence from Pahute and Rainier mesas

“…He named this stable adaptation the Desert Culture.' Likewise, Thomas (1982a or b:163) ' The claim for continuity of the Desert Culture made by Jennings (1957) and Jennings and Norbeck (1955) initiated one of the more interesting debates to occur in Great Basin archaeology; and, although he wrote an obituary for his concept of the Desert Culture (Jennings, 1973), the question of just how much environmental change has influenced the prehistoric life ways in the Great Basin remains to be answered (O'Connell and Madsen, 1982;Grayson, 1993).…”

“…we may conclude that although there is considerable variability in ethnographic populations of hunters and gatherers, this variability occurs within definite limits around a middle latitude nucleus that tends to organize their subsistence activities around the gathering of plant resources, supplementing this with either fish or wild game or both, and following a logistical mobility pattern that confoms to Binford's (1980) collectors strategy. This norm, to use a much disdained term, conforms to Jennings and Norbeck's (1955) conception of the Desert Culture, to Steward's (1938) so-called Western Shoshone model, and to the recorded ethnographic adaptations on Pahute and Rainier mesas (Pippin, 1996). However, various extremes from this norm can be recognized; and it is in these extremes that we may anticipate how the hunters and gatherers who utilized Pahute and Rainier mesas may have modified their behavior to conform to changing environments.…”