Great Basin Peoples
The Great Basin Peoples are the indigenous groups that have inhabited the Great Basin region of North America, which spans across parts of Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. This ecologically diverse area features a mix of arid deserts, grasslands, and alpine environments, shaped by its location between several mountain ranges. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first peoples arrived around 9500 B.C.E., bringing with them advanced hunting techniques and tool-making skills. Over millennia, these groups adapted to changing climatic conditions, with early Holocene foragers initially thriving on abundant resources from lakes and marshes, before transitioning to more challenging subsistence strategies as the climate grew drier.
By the Late Holocene, a resurgence in favorable conditions allowed for greater population growth and social organization, as families settled near resource-rich areas, developing semi-permanent dwellings. The Great Basin Peoples employed a rich material culture to support their mobile lifestyles, crafting tools, clothing, and art from local materials and establishing extensive trade networks. As their culture evolved, they incorporated new technologies such as the bow and arrow, and some groups began to engage in agriculture. The Fremont peoples, for example, established year-round villages and cultivated crops, influenced by neighboring cultures. Overall, the Great Basin Peoples exhibit a deep connection to their environment and a resilience shaped by thousands of years of adaptation and cultural development.
Great Basin Peoples
Related civilizations: Fremont culture, Southwest peoples.
Date: 9500 b.c.e.-700 c.e.
Locale: Interior western North America
Great Basin Peoples
The Great Basin is ecologically diverse, marked by shrubby deserts, sweeping grasslands, broad intermontaine valleys, resource-rich wetlands, piñon- or juniper-dotted hill slopes, high steppes, alpine tundra, and dramatic mountain ranges. The region is framed by the Sierra Nevada, the Southern Cascades, and the Wasatch Range and the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. The Great Basin ranges over nearly 165,000 square miles (428,000 square kilometers) and includes all Nevada and portions of California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Lying in the rain shadow of the Sierras, the arid to semiarid terrain of the Great Basin Desert receives an average of only 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rainfall per year.
The first peoples moved into the Great Basin about 9500 b.c.e. They left behind tools, quarry workshops, and the large fluted (broadly grooved) stone tips of their hunting spears on the area’s ancient lake terraces. They soon occupied caves and rock shelters. Ancient stemmed spear points in cave deposits in Oregon, Nevada, and Utah have been dated to about 9200 b.c.e. Over the next several thousand years, people lived on the shores of the shallow lakes and marshes that formed in the early Holocene period (8000-5500 b.c.e.). These early Holocene foragers most likely enjoyed a life of relative plenty, pursuing large game, waterfowl, fish, shellfish, roots, and abundant marsh plants.
By the Middle Holocene period (5500-2500 b.c.e.), dramatic changes in the region’s climate were underway. As the region became warmer and drier, the lowland valleys and productive marshes that once provided an Eden-like existence dried up and became markedly less inviting to prudent foragers. Plant and animal distributions shifted, and people began to exploit a greater range of environments to sustain life in an increasingly uncertain world. Population densities declined locally as people moved upland to intensify their use of critical water sources and dryland plants (especially grass seeds) and large and small mammals. Grinding stones for processing seeds in bulk became essential components of the toolkit.
Small game and grass seeds required considerably more effort to procure and process than the large game and marsh resources of earlier times. Therefore, Middle Holocene foragers of the Great Basin worked harder than their ancestors, moved regularly in pursuit of food, lived lives of considerable stress, and no doubt often faced starvation.
By the Late Holocene (beginning in 2500 b.c.e.), the harsh conditions of life appear to have eased considerably. The climate became cooler and moister, and population growth surged. People were broadly distributed, and archaeological sites from this time are numerous.
The distribution of water and food across the landscape determined where, when, and how often bands of closely related kin traveled and camped. Several hundred plant species (roots, berries, grass and shrub seeds, sedges, tule and cattail seeds, and, where available, piñon nuts and agave) made up the largest share of the diet. Large and small game (deer, antelope, mountain sheep, bison in some locales, rabbits, marmots, gophers, waterfowl) and fish provided less than one-third of the subsistence base. Men and women probably cooperated in the food quest during communal rabbit drives, fishing activities, piñon nut gathering, insect collecting, and waterfowl hunting. Storage of food was critical for winter survival.
In some locations, where productive marshes and riverine habitats provided dense food resources, social groups based on large, extended families (perhaps up to fifteen people) were able to settle almost year-round. They exploited the nearby wetland resources, building houses covered in bark, tule, or grass mats. Where food resources were sparse and widely scattered, small nuclear family groups established only brief encampments, occupying small, domed brush wickiups. Such camps, occupied for a few days at a time, were set down in far-flung habitats as food became available seasonally.
As part of their stone tool industry, Great Basin foragers developed an ingenious material culture for the day-to-day requirements of a mobile life in the desert. Plant processing tools were made from coarse stone. Seed-collecting baskets, paddle-shaped seed beaters, winnowing/parching trays, soft bags, and cradles were woven from plant fibers. Fiber cordage was used to fashion snares and nets for catching birds, rabbits, and fish. Cutting and scraping tools and the points on spears, darts, and arrows were flaked from stone (obsidian, chert, chalcedony, and basalt). Sinew was used for hafting tools and making bowstrings. Wood was carved into dart shafts, digging sticks, atlatls (spear-throwers). Bone was shaped into awls, flakers, tubes, and pipes. Clothing was manufactured from leather (moccasins and garments), rabbit skins (robes), grass, and shredded sagebrush bark (sandals).
Works of art, symbol, and ritual were also important. The Great Basin peoples produced figurines, ornaments, and flutelike musical instruments. They distributed shell beads, turquoise, and obsidian through extensive trade networks. Elaborate rock art was pecked, incised, or painted on boulders and cave walls near hunting zones, seed and root harvesting fields, and ceremonial areas.
After 700 c.e.
A few hundred years after the beginning of the common era, Great Basin culture began to experience significant change. The bow and arrow was introduced around 300 c.e., and a few centuries later, pottery made its appearance in parts of the basin but remained a scarce commodity overall. Around this time, villagelike settlements were pushed by lowland population pressures to the extraordinary alpine tundra zones of high mountain ranges. Some archaeologists have suggested that about 1000 c.e., significant migrations of peoples from southeastern California fanned out and up through the Great Basin, bringing new technologies, foraging patterns, and languages with them (accounting for the distribution of modern Numic languages). Between 500 and 1350 c.e., the Fremont peoples of the eastern Great Basin, probably influenced by the Anasazi civilization of the Southwest, settled into small, year-round villages and supplemented hunting and gathering with cultivation of maize, beans, and squash.
Bibliography
Beck, Charlotte, ed. Models for the Millennium: Great Basin Anthropology Today. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999.
D’Azevedo, Warren L., ed. Great Basin. Vol. 11 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986.
Grayson, Donald K. The Desert’s Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.