The arrival of Europeans, and later Americans, to California in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to complex social and economic turmoil for Native Americans. Throughout this period, Native Americans found myriad ways of resisting colonial influence and maintaining traditional ways. In this article, we explore how two places considered ?remote? by colonial powers (San Clemente Island and the Coso Range in the Mojave Desert) served as ideal locations for those seeking to remove themselves from the colonial system. Although local cultural and economic circumstances were different, both locations were less desirable to Euroamerican settlers until relatively late in time. Using the ideal free distribution model as a theoretical framework, this article argues that the remoteness of these areas allowed Native cultures to continue in traditional ways until the 1850s on the Channel Islands and the 1870s in the Coso Range.

P erhaps the largest-scale archaeological study ever undertaken in the Great Basin, the Ruby Pipeline Project included the investigation of 566 prehistoric sites across northern Nevada.A 13,000 year record of human occupation was documented spanning the first pluvial lake settlements at the close of the last Ice Age to the rise of the Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute.This archaeological record is replete with vast obsidian quarries, upland root-gathering sites, major residential bases, specialized hunting camps, and large-scale antelope traps.We are introduced to a prehistoric world of continual change, one marked by transformed environments, shifts in settlement and subsistence structure, and even wholesale population movements.The result is a work that allows us to chronicle the initial colonization of northern Nevada, monitor the subsequent process of population growth and dispersal, document the evolution of exchange systems, and propose a compelling new version of Numic prehistory.

A rich archaeological record spanning much of the Holocene exists in the Coso Range of southeastern California. An archaeological survey of over 2,564 acres was focused within the pinyon-juniper zone of these uplands at Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake. In total, 184 prehistoric sites were recorded, and are used here to evaluate a series of alternative models regarding the origins of intensive pinyon nut use in the southwestern Great Basin. These findings indicate that fully-ripened nuts were probably used on a regular basis deep into antiquity, but the more intensive(and expensive) harvest of green-cone pinyon nuts largely occurred after 1,350 B.P This conclusion has important implications for interpreting prehistoric land-use patterns in the region, and supports earlier hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for the spread of Numic populations during the later phases of prehistory.

Archaeological survey within the Coso Mountains resulted in the discovery of two wooden bows. The artifacts were cached in a rock crevice, and appear to represent sinew-backed, reflexed bows commonly used by Native peoples throughout much of the Great Basin. Due to rapid declines in the use of bow-and-arrow technology brought about by the introduction of guns during the historic