The Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Record in the Northwestern Great Basin: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and How We May Be Wrong

ABSTRACT

The Great Basin has traditionally not featured prominently in discussions of how and when the New World was colonized; however, in recent years work at Oregon's Paisley Five Mile Point Caves and other sites has highlighted the region's importance to ongoing debates about the peopling of the Americas. In this paper, we outline our current understanding of Paleoindian lifeways in the northwestern Great Basin, focusing primarily on developments in the past 20 years. We highlight several potential biases that have shaped traditional interpretations of Paleoindian lifeways and suggest that the foundations of ethnographically-documented behavior were present in the earliest period of human history in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Great Basin
• Paleoindian archaeology
• peopling of the Americas

Acknowledgements

Lisbeth Louderback (University of Utah), Erick Robinson, Nathaniel Kitchel, and Robert Kelly (University of Wyoming) shared radiocarbon date compilations. Katelyn Mohr (University of Nevada, Reno) calibrated some of the radiocarbon dates. Dennis Jenkins (University of Oregon), Bryan Hockett (Bureau of Land Management), Mel Aikens (University of Oregon), and one anonymous reviewer provided helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. Our understanding of northwestern Great Basin prehistory has benefitted immensely from ongoing conversations with Catherine Fowler (University of Nevada, Reno), Gene Hattori (Nevada State Museum), Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones (Hamilton College), William Cannon (Lakeview BLM), and Tom Connolly and Patrick O’Grady (University of Oregon). Special thanks to Ted Goebel for waiting with a glacier’s patience while we completed this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey M. Smith is Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit, University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his PhD at the University of Wyoming in 2010. His research interests include the human colonization of the Great Basin, lithic technology, and Great Basin archaeology.

Pat Barker is Research Associate at the Nevada State Museum. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in 1982. His research interests include rock art, perishable technology, and Great Basin archaeology.

Notes

1. All dates are calendar years before present (cal yr BP) unless otherwise specified (e.g., a radiocarbon date associated with a particular sample). In some cases, papers we cited presented only radiocarbon years without standard errors; we converted these to approximate cal yr BP equivalents using Appendix 1 in Grayson (2011) and rounded them to the nearest 25 calendar years. For consistency’s sake, we recalibrated all radiocarbon dates cited in this paper using the OxCal 4.2 calibration program with the IntCal 13 curve (Ramsey 2009) and reported the midpoints of calibrated age ranges rounded to the nearest 25 years.

2. Table 1 represents our best effort to compile TP/EH radiocarbon dates from published sources. We arbitrarily set 7500 ¹⁴C yr BP (∼8300 cal yr BP) as the end of the period. We excluded dates that were rejected outright by the sites’ original investigators but generally included dates that were accepted by the sites’ original investigators, even if they were questioned by later researchers.