David B. Madsen

The Fremont Complex: A Behavioral Perspective

The Fremont complex is composed of farmers and foragers who occupied the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin region of western North America from about 2100 to 500 years ago. These people included both immigrants and indigenes who shared some material culture and symbolic attributes, but also varied in ways not captured by definitions of the Fremont as a shared cultural tradition. The complex reflects a mosaic of behaviors including full-time farmers, full-time foragers, part-time farmer/foragers who seasonally switched modes of production, farmers who switched to full-time foraging, and foragers who switched to full-time farming. Farming defines the Fremont, but only in the sense that it altered the matrix in which both farmers and foragers lived, a matrix which provided a variety of behavioral options to people pursuing an array of adaptive strategies. The mix of symbiotic and competitive relationships among farmers and between farmers and foragers presents challenges to detection in the archaeological record. Greater clarity results from use of a behavioral model which recognizes differing contexts of selection favoring one adaptive strategy over another. The Fremont is a case where the transition from foraging to farming is followed by a millennium of adaptive diversity and terminates with the abandonment of farming. As such, it serves as a potential comparison to other cases in the world during the early phases of the food producing transition.

Dating Shuidonggou and the Upper Palaeolithic blade industry in North China

Shuidonggou is unique within the Chinese Palaeolithic sequence and its assemblage is reminiscent of Upper Palaeolithic core-and-blade technologies in Mongolia and southern Siberia. Limited chronological controls have prevented evaluation of this technology in both the Chinese and greater Eurasian Palaeolithic. Dating of recently discovered hearths at Locality 2 places Shuidonggou firmly at 29,000–24,000 BP, and suggests the spread of the Eurasian large blade technology was primarily from north to south. The concurrent production of small microblade-like bipolar bladelets at the site may also presage the development of a microlithic industry.

The 87Sr/86Sr ratios of lacustrine carbonates and lake-level history of the Bonneville paleolake system

Lakes in the Bonneville basin have fluctuated dramatically in response to changes in rainfall, temperature, and drainage diversion during the Quaternary. We analyzed tufas and shells from shorelines of known ages in orderto develop a relation between 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratio of carbonates and lake level, which then can be used as a basis for constraining lake level from similar analyses on carbonates in cores. Carbonates from the late Quaternary shorelines yield the following average 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratios: 0.71173 for the Stansbury shoreline (22-20 1 4 C ka; 1350 m), 0.71153 for the Bonneville shoreline (15.5-14.5 1 4 C ka; 1550 m), 0.71175 for the Provo shoreline (14.4-14.0 1 4 C ka; 1450 m), 0.71244 for the Gilbert shoreline (∼10.3-10.9 1 4 C ka; 1300 m), and 0.71469 for the modern Great Salt Lake (1280 m). These analyses show that the 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratio of lacustrine carbonates changes substantially at low- to mid-lake levels but is invariant at mid- to high-lake levels. Sr-isotope mixing models of Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville paleolake system were constructed to explain these variations in 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratios with change in lake level. Our model of the Bonneville system produced a 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratio of 0.71193, very close to the observed ratios from high-shoreline tufa and shell. The model verifies that the integration of the southern Sevier and Beaver rivers with the Bear and others rivers in the north is responsible for the lower 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratios in Lake Bonneville compared to the modern Great Salt Lake. We also modeled the 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratio of Lake Bonneville with the upper Bear River diverted into the Snake River basin and obtained an 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratio of 0.71414. Coincidentally, this ratio is close to the observed ratio for Great Salt Lake of 0.71469. This means that 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratios of >0.714 for carbonate can be produced by climatically induced low-lake conditions or by diversion of the upper Bear River out of the Bonneville basin. This model result also demonstrates that the upper Bear River had to be flowing into the Bonneville basin during highstands of other late Quaternary lake cycles: carbonates from the Little Valley (130-160 ka) and Cutler Dam (59 ′ 5 ka) lake cycles returned 8 7 Sr/ 8 6 Sr ratios of 0.71166 and 0.71207, respectively, and are too low to be produced by a lake without the upper Bear River input.

Yaks, yak Dung, and prehistoric human habitation of the Tibetan Plateau

This paper explores the importance of yak dung as a source of fuel for early human inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau. The wild and domestic yak is introduced, followed by a discussion of yak dung production, collection, and energetic return. Yak dung is compared with other products such as milk, pack energy, and meat, demonstrating its high energetic value while emphasizing that various yak products serve different, complementary, and nonfungible purposes. Following this review of yak dung energetics, issues related to the early peopling of the Tibetan Plateau become the paper’s focus. Availability of yak dung as a fuel was a potentially critical factor for colonization of the high Plateau, where other fuel sources are largely lacking. The patchy distribution of dung on the landscape may have required the development of various strategies for ensuring an adequate supply during foragers’ travels in the high Plateau. Meeting fuel needs may have led to the integration of the wild yak into human settlement systems and may have contributed to behaviors that resulted in the yak’s domestication.

Lake evolution of the terminal area of Shiyang River drainage in arid China since the last glaciation

Investigations of geomorphology and sedimentology, and analyses of radiocarbon dates, grain size and carbonate of the sediment at the present-dry closed basin in the terminal area of Shiyang River in and China were conducted to recover the history of palaeolake change since the last glacial. The terminal area was covered by eolian sand before 13,000 C-14 BP. Lacustrine deposits covered the eolian sand after 13,000 C-14 BP, but were succeeded rapidly by eolian or fluvial deposits ca. 11,200-10,000 BP. This fact plus the grain-size distribution and CaCO3 content showed that climate was extremely dry during the last glacial, but wet-dry oscillations characterized the late glacial. A single coalescent lake, over 45 m deep and 2130 km(2), formed between 10,000-6400 C-14 BP in the basin. The lake disintegrated into several shallow carbonate lakes or swamps gradually after 6400 C-14 BP. Eolian sand reached into the most part of the basin during the period. The lake evolution in the area generally reflects the East Asian summer monsoon history forced by Northern hemisphere insolation. Short time-scale lake fluctuations also existed in the area since the last glacial

The Loess/Paleosol Record and the Nature of the Younger Dryas Climate in Central China

The use of latest Pleistocene-Holocene paleosols in defining Chinese climatic sequences is plagued by poor chronological controls caused primarily by the use of radiocarbon dates derived from bulk soil carbon. Dating of a post-glacial aeolian/paleosol sequence in the Pigeon Mountain basin of north-central China, using culturally deposited charcoal, support a wide array of other data suggesting the Younger Dryas was a period of cooler dryer conditions marked by wide-spread aeolian deposition. Periods of soil formation and higher lake levels bracket this climatic event. Climatic variability immediately before, during and immediately after the Younger Dryas interval is associated with rapid technological elaboration and innovation in the production and use of chipped stone tools, and perhaps, ground stone. q 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A Framework for the Initial Occupation of the Americas

Abstract A substantial amount of archaeological data suggests groups with markedly different lithic technologies and subsistence adaptations were widespread throughout both American continents by ∼13–13.5 ka. While there are fewer archaeological sites credibly dated to ∼13.5–15.5 ka, they are sufficient to indicate human foragers occupied at least the Pacific coasts of both continents and probably interior continental locations as well. Assuming it required at least 500–2000 years for initial populations to expand throughout these regions, the first colonists must have begun to spread throughout the Americas south of the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets well before post-glacial global warming at 14.5 ka resulted in the melting of the ice sheets and a rapid rise in sea levels. The European and Asian gateway regions to the Americas were occupied by ∼35 ka, and the initial colonization likely post-dates this interval. Genetic data suggest the first colonists derive from populations that occupied the Altai Mountains area of central Asia sometime before ∼24 ka, but this hypothesis is based on the modern distribution of haplogroups, and the locations of their ancestral populations at the time they diverged from parent Eurasian populations is unknown. The Altai region is equidistant from both the Atlantic and Pacific gateways to the Americas, and the direction from which the first Americans arrived is a matter of speculation. There are no empirical data supporting the genetic-based hypothesis that there was a population “standstill” in interior Beringia for thousands of years. If there was such a standstill, it more likely occurred in coastal refugia or in other areas in northeast Asia. Scattered data suggest the possibility the Americas were initially occupied sometime prior to ∼17 ka, but these need to be confirmed before they are widely accepted. Of the three most viable hypotheses for the peopling of the Americas, a Clovis First – Ice-free Corridor model appears to be dead and buried; an Atlantic Ice Shelf – Solutrean Origin model is untested, with no empirical data either supporting or falsifying the model; a Pacific coastal model may be the most viable explanation for the initial peopling of the Americas, but also has limited empirical support. This model suggests that boat-using foragers, with an adaptation to the shorelines and estuaries of the Pacific Rim, moved around the margins of the northern Pacific into North and South America before expanding into interior continental regions. Such a migration likely occurred during or prior to the last full glacial.

Antiquity of early Holocene small-seed consumption and processing at Danger Cave

When did people start to eat small seeds, and what drove them to it? New investigations and dating at the Danger Cave in the American Great Basin show that seeds (pickleweed seeds) did not become part of the staple diet until after 8700 b.p. It was at this time that animal and plant resources had begun to seriously diminish in a shrinking wetland.

Early Holocene pinyon (Pinus monophylla) in the northeastern Great Basin

Fine-grained excavation and analysis of a stratigraphic column from Danger Cave, northeastern Great Basin, suggests prehistoric hunter-gatherers were collecting and using singleleaf pinyon (Pinus monophylla) near the site for at least the last 7500 yr. Human use of the cave began after the retreat of Lake Bonneville from the Gilbert level, shortly before 10,000 yr B.P. In stratum 9, culturally deposited pine nut hulls appear in the sequence by about 7900 yr B.P. and are continuously present thereafter. A hull fragment in stratum 10 is directly dated to 7410 ± 120 yr B.P. These dates are at least 2000 yr earlier than expected by extrapolation to macrofossil records from the east-central and central Great Basin, and necessitate some revision of current biogeographical models of late Quaternary pinyon migration.

BIOGEOGRAPHIC IMPLICATIONS OF RECENT LOW-ELEVATION RECOLONIZATION BY NEOTOMA CINEREA IN THE GREAT BASIN

Abstract Homestead Cave, a paleontological site located in a low-elevation arid setting in the northern Bonneville Basin of northcentral Utah, documents the local extinction of Neotoma cinerea during the Middle Holocene. N. cinerea is present there today, and the Homestead Cave record suggests that recolonization likely occurred sometime prior to 1,000 years ago. This history supports the view (forwarded by T. E. Lawlor) that cross-valley dispersal by mammals that generally are most abundant in cooler and moister (and therefore higher elevation) parts of the Great Basin is still occurring, showing that Browns model of Great Basin montane mammalian biogeography is incorrect. These dispersal patterns suggest that conservation efforts directed toward montane mammals in the Great Basin must include low-elevation access corridors to mountain masses.