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60 books match the query 'Paleo-Indians' and 5 start with f

cover of First Peoples of Great Salt Lake: A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming

First Peoples of Great Salt Lake

A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming

Steven R. Simms

University of Utah Press, 2023

Great Salt Lake is a celebrated, world-recognized natural landmark. It, and the broader region bound to it, is also a thoroughly cultural landscape; generations of peoples made their lives there. In an eminently readable narrative, Steven Simms, one of the foremost archaeologists of the region, traces the scope of human history dating from the Pleistocene, when First Peoples interacted with the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville, to nearly the present day. Through vivid descriptions of how people lived, migrated, and mingled, with persistence and resilience, Simms honors the long human presence on the landscape.

First Peoples of Great Salt Lake takes a different approach to understanding the ancients than is typical of archaeology. De-emphasizing categories and labels, it traces changing environments, climates, and peoples through the notion of place. It challenges the "Pristine Myth," the cultural bias that Indigenous peoples were timeless, changeless, primitive, and the landscapes they lived in sparsely populated and perpetually pristine. First Peoples and their descendants modified the forests and understory vegetation, shaped wildlife populations, and adapted to long-term climate change. Native Americans of Great Salt Lake were very much part of their world, and the story here is one of long continuity through dramatic cultural change.


 
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cover of Foragers and Farmers of the Northern Kayenta Region: Excavations along the Navajo Mountain Road

Foragers and Farmers of the Northern Kayenta Region

Excavations along the Navajo Mountain Road

Phil Geib

University of Utah Press, 2011

Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize

Foragers and Farmers of the Northern Kayenta Region presents the results of a major archaeological excavation project on Navajo tribal land in the Four Corners area and integrates this new information with existing knowledge of the archaeology of the northern Kayenta region. The excavation of thirty-three sites provides a cross section of prehistory from which Navajo Nation archaeologists retrieved a wealth of information about subsistence, settlement, architecture, and other aspects of past lifeways. The project’s most important contributions involve the Basketmaker and Archaic periods, and include a large number of radiocarbon dates on high-quality samples. Dating back to the early Archaic period (ca. 7000 BC) and ranging forward through the Basketmaker components to the Puebloan period, this volume is a powerful record of ancient peoples and their cultures. Detailed supplementary data will be available on the University of Utah Press Web site upon publication of this summary volume.

Volume 2: Archaic Site Descriptions
Volume 3: Basketmaker Site Descriptions
Volume 4: Puebloan Site Descriptions
Volume 5: Analyses and Interpretation
Appendix Volume
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cover of Foraging in the Tennessee River Valley: 12,500 to 8,000 Years Ago

Foraging in the Tennessee River Valley

12,500 to 8,000 Years Ago

Kandace D. Hollenbach

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Plants are inarguably a significant component of the diets of foraging peoples in non-arctic environments. As such, the decisions and activities associated with the gathering and exploitation of plants are important to foragers’ subsistence pursuits. Plant remains are particularly important for understanding gathering activities. Inasmuch as plant foods comprised a considerable portion of early foragers’ diets, and the gathering and processing of these plant resources occupied a significant proportion of the population, namely women, children, and the elderly, an understanding of gathering activities and how they relate to use of the landscape is critical. Organic remains are poorly preserved in the acidic soils of the Southeast and are often limited or absent from open-air sites, but archaeological deposits protected within rockshelters provide an exception. Organic remains are consistently well preserved in their rain-protected deposits, and rockshelters are locations that groups repeatedly visited. Because of this repeated use and remarkable preservation, significant quantities of well-preserved faunal and botanical remains can be recovered from rockshelter deposits. 
 
In Foraging, Hollenbach analyzes and compares botanical remains from archaeological excavations in four rockshelters in the Middle Tennessee River Valley. The artifact assemblages of rockshelter and open-air sites are similar, so it is reasonable to assume that faunal and botanical assemblages would be similar, if open-air sites had comparable preservation of organic remains. The rich organic data recovered from rockshelters therefore may be considered representative of general subsistence and settlement strategies, and can significantly inform our views of lifeways of Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic peoples. The data produced from this analysis provides a valuable baseline of plant food use by early foragers in the region, and establishes a model of Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic lifeways in the Southeast.
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cover of From Colonization to Domestication: Population, Environment, and the Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America

From Colonization to Domestication

Population, Environment, and the Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America

D. Shane Miller

University of Utah Press, 2018

Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize.

Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data—stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites—to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the end of the last Ice Age to the appearance of indigenous domesticated plants roughly 5,000 years ago.

Miller argues that the origins of plant domestication lie within the context of a boom/bust cycle that culminated in the mid-Holocene, when hunter-gatherers were able to intensively exploit shellfish, deer, oak, and hickory. After this resource “boom” ended, some groups shifted to other plants in place of oak and hickory, which included the suite of plants that were later domesticated. Accompanying these subsistence trends is evidence for increasing population pressure and declining returns from hunting. Miller contends, however, that the appearance of domesticated plants in eastern North America, rather than simply being an example of necessity as the mother of invention, is the result of individuals adjusting to periods of both abundance and shortfall driven by climate change. 
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cover of Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology: From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains

Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology

From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains

Robert H. Brunswig

University Press of Colorado, 2007

As the Ice Age waned, Clovis hunter-gatherers began to explore and colonize the area now known as Colorado. Their descendents and later Paleoindian migrants spread throughout Colorado's plains and mountains, adapting to diverse landforms and the changing climate. In this new volume, Robert H. Brunswig and Bonnie L. Pitblado assemble experts in archaeology, paleoecology-climatology, and paleofaunal analysis to share new discoveries about these ancient people of Colorado.

The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.

Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.

Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book. Contributors include Rosa Maria Albert, Robert H. Brunswig, Reid A. Bryson, Linda Scott Cummings, James Doerner, Daniel C. Fisher, David L. Fox, Bonnie L. Pitblado, Jeffrey L. Saunders, Todd A. Surovell, R. A. Varney, and Nicole M. Waguespack.


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