Chapter One Table of Contents
I. INTRODUCTION
The Great Basin Restoration Initiative (GBRI) is a multi-state, multi-agency, state, local, and federal initiative focused on “restoration” of the sage/pinion/juniper biome within 75 million acres of the Great Basin. To advance restoration efforts, ecological planning boundaries were created and multiple-use management goals, including those pertaining to cultural resource management and protection were, or are in the process of, being developed. Many of the management goals of the GBRI can be accomplished if cultural resources (significant historic, prehistoric, and ethnohistoric sites and localities) can be managed in a more efficient manner.
One way to facilitate management and planning is to develop and test cultural resource distribution models that predict site density and distribution for planning purposes. Over the last several years, predictive models have been generated for relatively large hydrologic basins (Railroad Valley and Pine Valley) in Nevada (Drews et al. 2002; Zeanah 1998) and Utah (Zeanah 2001). These models are based on relatively fine-grained analyses of landscape, soils and geomorphology and they predict cultural trends that appear to be valid within their respective hydrologic basin.
While landforms and vegetation classes are relatively consistent across the Great Basin, orthographic effects of bounding mountain ranges create microclimates within each hydrographic basin so that vegetation and landform mosaics are not always comparable across broad areas of the landscape. The challenge for the GBRI cultural resources model is to test a larger area, coarser, landscape level modeling. Based on the model, areas within the GBRI area can be more effectively managed to ensure efficient use of a BLM district’s resources while furthering the goals of the GBRI. The model should be a basis for understanding history and prehistory of the GBRI landscape and how humans have positioned themselves on the landscape over time.
With that task in mind, an extensive project boundary consisting of 12 major hydrographic basins covering 20,533,700 acres within Nevada, Utah, and Idaho was chosen for study. The area includes environments typical of Nevada basins, the Snake River plateau, and the Great Salt Lake basin. Model results are useful to managers at the Bureau of Land Management, Elko and Ely field offices in Nevada; the Salt Lake, Filmore and Cedar City Field Offices in Utah; and the Owyhee and Jarbidge field offices in Idaho.
A Perspective on Study Goals
The goals of this study are, to be frank, more managerial than anthropological. Our charge was to examine where archaeology is most likely to be found, and when found, where it was most likely to be an impediment to Great Basin Restoration Initiative land use goals. The management orientation of this study does not mean there is no component of science to it. Our ability to formulate reasonable hypotheses about historic and prehistoric settlement patterns – to devise simple initial models at all – derives from research by ourselves but especially by others. We make no claim to be doing “deep science” in the hypothetico-deductive mode in this study. Nevertheless, we have striven to make the results and information useful to those interested in more focused work of that sort.
The sheer size of the study area itself precludes all but the most cursory of scientific,deductive, model-building on human behavior. Typically, one requires very fine-grained information for particular time periods to create an effective deductive study. For instance, Zeanah (1995) used an area approximately 5% the size of this study area for his analysis of prehistoric foraging patterns and the resulting archaeological record in Churchill County, Nevada. As we discuss below, the study has utility for management and for researchers, but in different ways.
Management and Implementation
Goals
A central concern with most models
is how managers will interpret and implement the results. The goal of this
project is not to create a lock step
management document (e.g., prescribed treatment within specific areas), but
rather as a planning tool for BLM managers, biologists, and cultural resource
specialists to evaluate potential conflicts as they work within the GBRI. From this general perspective, several research
questions can be generated.
·
Which
landscape factors are the best predictors of cultural resource location?
·
What
management characteristics in terms of National Register status or Cultural Resource
Use Allocations do resources have, and how are they distributed? (cf. BLM
Manual Section 8110, “Identifying Cultural Resources”)
·
Do sensitivity
boundaries relate to criteria that are readily observable in the field and can
they be identified through simple overlay of available data? Are more complex
analyses required for the model to be effective?
·
Is the
planning model a useful tool to aid in the identification of areas where
imminent threats from natural or human caused actions may cause deterioration
of significant cultural resources?
·
Defining
limits of knowledge and areas of further information needs.
·
Procedural
recommendations concerning subsequent data gathering, testing and strengthening
of the model.
The work also provides a chance to contrast the management outcomes of broad-scale, inductive models with detailed deductive models based on optimal foraging theory. Railroad Valley, Pine Valley, and the Dugway Proving Grounds area all lay within or nearby the study area. These three areas are or have been examined with detailed forager behavior models. The anthropological models have resulted in a consideration of management plans and needs within respective study areas. Those models provide an informative contrast to this large-scale model.
Anthropological Goals
The large, and diverse, scientific literature on human settlement patterns is the anthropological context of this study. Although the study goals are, in essence, the discovery of correlation and not its explanation, settlement pattern is necessarily an outcome of the study too. This study undoubtedly raises more questions than it attempts to answer. That is one of the shortcomings of correlation approaches in general. Nevertheless, our intent is that the questions that it raises are themselves useful scientific leads for further research.
Some of the questions that a study such as this leaves unanswered but tantalizingly available for speculation include: Are there discernable relationships between site assemblages and the landscape? Springs and other perennial or predictable seasonal water sources are thought to be attractants of prehistoric use. Is this really the case? What about the potential for buried sites; is this usually greater near springs? Likewise, is there a discernable pattern of early sites along Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene lakeshore margins? Are potential wetland environments good predictors of sites density?
Beyond settlement pattern studies themselves, there are questions of change through time in the prehistoric archaeological record that the study examines in broad view. Subsistence change was one such question that we hoped to address. The occurrence of pinyon pine in the study area and its role as a dietary staple generates several issues of interest. Over time, pinyon has general spread from south to north, fluctuating up and down in elevation in response to temperature and precipitation regimes (Grayson 1983). Pinyon may have never been present in the northernmost portion of the study area.
We assume that there is a detectable archaeological signature for pinyon exploitation. In many parts of the basin, that signature is rock rings and groundstone implements, within proximity to the current pinyon-juniper zone (see Thomas and Bettinger 1976:272). Sites containing those features may indicate the overall range of pinyon through time, in terms of its expansion from the south, as well as localized elevational expansion and contraction.
This assumption may be faulty since groundstone could have been used to process any number of seed resources and all vegetation expands and contracts with climatic variation. Site density alone may be a better measure of exploitable resource zones.
Several antelope traps are known from this part of the Great Basin. The west central portion of the study area is characterized by high mountains that collect moisture during the winter and with relatively low, open valleys that come into production during early spring and are moistened by runoff late into the summer. Valleys provide ample forbs and browse. Open juniper woodlands in the foothills provide access to construction materials for drive fences. Analysis of landscape in the vicinity of known antelope drives may serve to develop a testable hypothesis for site location.
Potential grasslands in the Snake River uplands may have provided prime bison habitat. A correlation between grasslands and Northern Side-notched projectile points might suggest big game hunting.
The distribution of Fremont sites across the landscape may reveal land use patterning and contingencies for site location relative to productive agricultural lands or specific resource procurement areas. Likewise the distribution of Late Prehistoric and pre-contact projectile points may identify Numic progressions from south to north across the project area.
Because of the size of the project area and the goals of the GBRI, the cultural resources models (one for prehistoric, another for historic period) is not spatially or temporally fine-grained. We used hundreds of spatial units for soils, vegetation, and topography. Yet, the size of the study area was so large that even the smallest spatial units are equal in size to the largest spatial units in for example, the Pine Valley study. Large area, landscape-level datasets were tested as predictors of cultural resource distribution and significance. In a sense, the study tests both the correlation itself and the methodology: the validity of developing models over such a large area using using spatially and categorically coarse datasets.
Report Overview
The study report has a simple
structure. We first describe the project setting, including its natural and
historical contexts (Chapter II). Next, we discuss how analytical units were divided
out of the study area as a whole (Chapter III). Chapter IV is an exposition of
the study methods. Chapter V presents the bulk of the study results, followed
by discussion and closing comments (Chapter VI).
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