Tufa Village (Nevada) : placing the Fort Sage Drift Fence in a larger archaeological context. (Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 102)
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Date
2017-06-16
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Publisher
American Museum of Natural History.
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Abstract
The Fort Sage Drift Fence is one of the largest pre-Contact rock features known in the Great Basin, and appears to date between 3700 and 1000 cal B.P. When Pendleton and Thomas (1983) first recorded the 2 km long complex, they were impressed by its sheer size and the amount of labor required to build it. This led them to hypothesize that it must have been constructed, maintained, and used by specialized groups associated with a centralized, village-based settlement system--a system that was not recognized in the archaeological record at that time. Their hypothesis turned out to be quite insightful, as subsequent analyses of faunal remains and settlement pattern data have documented the rise of logistical hunting organization linked to higher levels of settlement stability between about 4500 and 1000 cal B.P. throughout much of the Great Basin. Although Pendleton and Thomas' (1983) proposal has been borne out on a general, interregional level, it has never been evaluated with local archaeological data. This monograph remedies this situation through reporting the excavation findings from a nearby, contemporaneous house-pit village site. These findings allow us to place the drift fence within its larger settlement context, and provide additional archaeological support for the original Pendleton-Thomas hypothesis.
Description
63 pages : illustrations (some color), maps ; 26 cm.
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Keywords
Paleo-Indians., Tufa Village Site (Nev.), Fort Sage Drift Fence Site (Nev.), Indians of North America -- Hunting., Land settlement patterns, Prehistoric -- Great Basin., Antiquities, Prehistoric., Nevada., Great Basin.