Featured Projects

THE GOLD BUTTE PROJECT

Undertaken at the request of the Bureau of Land Management Las Vegas Field Office, the Gold Butte study encompasses 364,116 acres in the northeast corner of Clark County, Nevada. Bounded by the Virgin River to the north and west and Colorado River to the south, this region manifests at least 12,000 years of continuous human use. Perhaps most significantly, it marks the western-most expansion of the ancestral Pueblo culture from core territories in the Southwest at about AD 800 to 1250. The project area, however, is located in desert hinterlands east of Pueblo settlements situated along the Virgin and Muddy Virgin river corridors. It also appears to have been a cross-road for later-dating populations, including the Patayan and ultimately the Southern Paiute, after the regional collapse of Pueblo settlements at approximately AD 1250.

Not surprisingly, the survey area exhibited a heterogeneous archaeological record replete with multiple ceramic wares, spectacular examples of Great Basin and Southwestern rock art traditions, higher-elevation piñyon camps, river-oriented pit houses, massive agave roasting features, and the ever-ubiquitous flaked and ground stone scatters.

To unravel this long use-history, we implemented a combined program of statistically representative sample survey coupled with limited test excavations at select sites. The purpose of the former was to determine the density and distribution of key site, feature, and artifact classes with respect to a series of major landforms and habitat types; the goals of the latter were to facilitate chronological ordering and recovery of artifact and dietary remains from controlled contexts. This work was conducted over a two-year period, between 2006 and 2008. All told, 31,196 sample areas were surveyed resulting in the documentation of 341prehistoric sites and 387 isolated finds.

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Thirty Years After: 1974 Excavations at Kirk Creek, CA-MNT-238, on the Big Sur Coast
By Patricia Mikkelsen, William Hildebrandt, Deborah Jones, Jeffrey Rosenthal, and Robert Gibson
Occasional Paper No. 18, San Luis Obispo County Archaeological Society 2005

The site, excavated in 1974, was a rich prehistoric shell midden deposit on a terrace adjacent to Highway 1 on the Big Sur Coast of California. The report reflects the unique project history, including personal recollections, a discussion of Native American lifeways and participation in the project, analysis and interpretation of 30-year-old data, and concluding with a hypothetical scenario of how it might have been for the early inhabitants of this stretch of coast.

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LAND AND RESOURCES MANAGEMENT 

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Alturas, Eagle Lake, and Surprise field offices are in the process of preparing a Resource Management Plan (RMP) for roughly 2.8 million acres of public lands in northeastern California and northwestern Nevada. As part of this process, Far Western was contracted to prepare a Class I Cultural Resource Overview and Working Research Design, needed to inform management decisions.

 The study culminated in a sophisticated sensitivity model developed using “weights of evidence” as a means of predicting prehistoric archaeological site distributions. The model incorporated site and survey locational information provided by the BLM, Forest Service, Caltrans, and the Northeastern Information Center of the California Historical Resource Information System to generate predicted densities of site locations.  Over 3,250 sites and 370,000 acres of survey were fed into the GIS-based model which addressed a suite of environmental variables including slope, landform, distance to water, and vegetation. 

Two other goals of the study were to identify land use conflicts and data gaps. Using the predictive model, GIS layers were developed to show the relationship between planned land use (grazing allotments, juniper cover) and culturally sensitive landforms. The model is intended to aid resource managers in identifying potential areas of conflict. The management recommendations emphasize that this exercise is intended as a general guide for resource managers, and that planned actions need to be evaluated on a project specific basis. Our analysis also revealed specific areas where the existing cultural resource data base could be improved to better serve both research and resource management.

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The Caltrans Black Creek Project—a program of archaeological evaluation and data recovery at the Black Creek site in Calaveras County—used innovative ways to interpret the past and educate the general public. 

The Black Creek Project produced a scientific report that includes landmark contributions to our understanding of California prehistory. We learn that the harvesting of acorns ¾ the pre-eminent food staple of California Native peoples—was well underway earlier than previously thought, perhaps as far back as 10,000 years ago. A new chronological framework for the central Sierra Nevada is established, allowing us to better organize our research on regional prehistoric change. Finally, we learn how the prehistoric cultures of the Sierra Nevada fundamentally differed from those of the Central Valley.

An educational booklet produced for the project—Stealing the Sun, details the Me-Wuk story through oral history, archaeology, and ethnography. Stealing the Sun was distributed to numerous schools, tribal groups, and organizations and is available as a web module at http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist6/environmental/docs/stealingthesun_ brochure.pdf 

Caltrans staff also regularly participates in public forums including lectures, workshops, school presentations, and professional meetings using the Black Creek study and Stealing the Sun as a basis for their presentations.