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The fascinating story of how a harsh terrain that resembled modern Antarctica has been transformed gradually into the forests, grasslands, and wetlands we know today.

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 125

Camels Back Cave is in an isolated limestone ridge on the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert. Recent archaeological investigations there have exposed a series of stratified deposits spanning the entire Holocene era (10,000 BP–present), deposits that show intermittent human occupations dating back through the past 7,600 years. Most human visits to the cave were brief—many likely representing overnight stays—and visitors did not dig pits or move sediment. As a result, fieldworkers were able to recognize and remove thirty-three stratigraphic horizons; radiocarbon analysis provided a pristine, high-resolution chronological sequence of human use. The brevity of visits and the undisturbed nature of the deposits also allowed researchers to identify portions of eight “living surfaces” where they exposed and mapped artifacts and ecofacts across contiguous blocks of units.

Aside from presenting model field techniques, this volume provides new and unique information on regional Holocene climates and biotic communities, cave taphonomy and small mammal hunting, as well as updated human chronologies for Great Basin occupation.

The research in this volume derives from investigations conducted in connection with proposed widening and realignment of the Paulina-East Lake Highway, located within the caldera of Newberry Volcano. Formal evaluation of 13 localities and data recovers at four sites produced a wealth of information regarding human uses of the caldera and vicinity throughout the Holocene.

Over the past thirty years, late Quaternary environments in the arid interior of western North America have been revealed by a unique source of fossils: well-preserved fragments of plants and animals accumulated locally by packrats and quite often encased, amberlike, in large masses of crystallized urine. These packrat middens are ubiquitous in caves and rock crevices throughout the arid West, where they can lie preserved for tens of thousands of years. More than a thousand of these deposits have been dated and analyzed, and middens have supplanted pollen records as a touchstone for studying vegetation dynamics and climatic change in radiocarbon time (the last 40,000 years). Now, similar deposits made by other mammals like hyraxes are being reported from other parts of the world.

This book brings together the findings and views of many of the researchers investigating fossil middens in the United States, Mexico, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. The contributions serve to open a forum for methodological concerns, update the fossil record of various geographic regions, introduce new applications, and display the vast potential for fossil midden analysis in arid regions worldwide. The findings presented here will serve to foster regional research and to promote general studies devoted to global climate change. Included in the text are more than two hundred charts, photographs, and maps.

Were the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin 'Paleoindians' in the traditional sense? Were they highly mobile foragers? Did they hunt large, now extinct animals like mammoth, horse, and camel?
 

Great Basin archaeologists have argued that the earliest inhabitants possessed an organization strategy of mixed 'Paleoindian' and 'Archaic' lifeways, referring to them as 'Paleoarchaic.'
 

Recent excavations of rock shelters and caves, coupled with innovative studies of the surface archaeological record have increased our understanding of human organization in the Great Basin during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. When did humans first inhabit the Great Basin? How do we interpret projectile point variability from late Pleistocene and early Holocene contexts? What land-use and foraging strategies characterized the early inhabitants? Did these hunter-gatherers possess a Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic lifeway?
 

This volume offers an updated perspective of human ecology and organization during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Great Basin, 13,000–8,000 years ago.