From 1768–1776, Francisco Garcés, O.F.M., undertook a series of “entradas” (explorations) into Native nations and territories throughout modern Arizona, Sonora, and the Californias. Mostly alone in Native company, he was guided from one settlement to the next, learning interrelationships, languages, and aspects of traditional knowledge. Much of Garcés’s work is unavailable in translation, and extant publications (whether in transcription, translation, or both) are largely uninformed by the ethnographic record. Focusing on two little-known accounts, this volume seeks to interpret Garcés’s ethnography in its pertinent historical contexts. The main document is a preliminary report (the “Noticias del Diario”) of his 1775–1776 entrada, compiled four months before the final diary. This report built upon his entradas of 1768–1774, summarized in another report (the “Noticias Sacadas”) immediately prior to the final expedition. Both reports, with related letters and accounts, are presented here in their original Spanish, interleaved with English translations. Ethnographic and historical annotations are interspersed, while Garcés’s routes are charted with historical and new maps. An appendix untangles documentary chronology (including via watermarks), and a second reconstructs his routes in detail. In all, Garcés visited more than 30 nations of three distinct language families. His observations at Hopi, among River Yumans, Takic, Yokuts, Numic, and Pai peoples, give often unique glimpses of Indigenous American societies at this period. Garcés was an ethnographer avant la lettre, learning directly from Native interlocutors. His work represents the dialogical precipitate and indirect transmission of some Native knowledge and practices within a large region of southwestern North America.
This second volume of the Alta Toquima trilogy situates Monitor Valley archaeology within the Central Mountains Archaic, introduced here as a taxonomic equivalent to the better-known Lovelock culture, Fremont complex, and the Virgin Branch of Ancestral Puebloans. This analysis integrates Monitor Valley into the broader Intermountain West using seven multiscalar time slices that address paleoclimatic and cultural change from the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene (pre-7000 cal b.c.) through the Little Ice Age (cal a.d. 1350–1800). This overview establishes that the loglinear relationships between two independent cultural proxies (nearly 5000 cultural radiocarbon dates and more than 47,000 time-sensitive projectile points) are highly correlated (r = 0.988) and relevant for explicating region-by-region demographic change. We hypothesize that the Intermountain West achieved (or exceeded) exponential growth throughout more than 90% of the 13 millennia spanning Paleoindian colonization through Euro-American contact. During two notable exceptions—the Late Holocene Dry Period (850 cal b.c.–cal a.d. 100) and the late 13th-century drought—human population growth fell below exponential expectations. The Late Holocene Dry Period (LHDP) was a pivotal climatic event that varied in geographic range, duration, and intensity. The 42°–40° N dipole hypothesis holds that persistent La Niña-like climatic conditions resulted in an anomalously moist northern Great Basin and exceptionally arid southwestern Great Basin, separated by an undulating dipole transition between 42° and 40° north latitude. Human demography plummeted below exponential expectations as foragers abandoned almost all settlements south of the 42°–40° N dipole, marking an intensification that shifted away from “man caves” and logistical bighorn hunting to extended family bands who created the first alpine residences at Alta Toquima. The high-elevation settlements were occupied only during the driest of the short-term xeric-mesic cycles during (and after) the LHDP. In wetter times, the alpine houses were abandoned in favor of repurposed man caves and other subalpine base camps. These syncopated intensifications began a full millennium before the arrival of bow technology into the Central Mountains Archaic. The other exception to exponential growth was the tumultuous late 13th-century drought, when the Fremont complex dissolved after a dozen centuries of farming, the Lovelock culture disappeared, and the Virgin Branch of Ancestral Puebloans collapsed—all part of the far-reaching demographic decline in the American Southwest and elsewhere across interior North America. In the aftermath of these fundamental economic shifts, changing social landscapes, and human migrations, the Little Ice Age returned to exponential growth during the challenges and windfalls for Shoshonean communities of the Intermountain West. This volume proposes and tests multiple hypotheses addressing the deep natural and cultural histories of the Intermountain West. Resilience theory proves to be an important tool in unraveling relationships between abrupt climatic and behavioral adjustments, human paleogeography, piñon pine processing, multiple meanings of abandonment, adaptation to lacustrine and desert-mountain mosaics, and shifting landscapes of ritualized practice.
Despite their ubiquity, surface occurrences of obsidian artifacts at archaeological sites throughout western North America have traditionally been viewed as unworthy of serious attention because of the difficulty in dating them. In the past 40 years, the time sensitivity of certain Great Basin projectile point types has been established, which brings the importance of surface collections more center stage. With the coming of age and refinement of geochemical methods, obsidian artifacts from these surface sites can now be analyzed using nondestructive instrumental methods and matched to their geological eruptive origin on the basis of congruence in trace and rare earth element chemistry. Many of these surface assemblages in the Great Basin contain considerable numbers of obsidian projectile points that, when matched to their chemical source of origin, open up entirely new ways to investigate change and continuity in past land use and social relations. The present study was conducted in the lower Humboldt Valley of western Nevada, where large numbers of obsidian projectile points have been collected by professional archaeologists over the past century and housed in academic institutions and museums. In this study, more than 900 obsidian projectile points and bifaces were analyzed from 24 sites and localities within the lower Humboldt Valley using energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) to bring data to bear on the question of whether changes in obsidian source use occurred there over the past 5000 years (as determined by time-sensitive projectile points). Significant changes were identified in the direction and distance-to-source of arrow points vs. dart points, and in the source and direction of Humboldt series points and of Humboldt Basal-notched bifaces, which implicate directional shifts through time in social relations among peoples using—and during some periods living at sites in—the lower Humboldt Valley. These results provide independent data to evaluate current views about land use, artifact conveyance, social relations, and technological change in the western Great Basin and beyond.
