Prehistoric Peoples of Lincoln County, Nevada

Who used to live in your neighborhood?

Lincoln County Archaeological Initiative Project

BLM

Funding for this project was provided by the sale of public lands by the Bureau of Land Management and approved under an inter-agency partnershipauthorized by the Lincoln County Land Act

Prehistoric Peoples of Lincoln County, Nevada

Who used to live in your neighborhood?

BySharon A. Waechterand Tammara Ekness NortonFar Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc.

2011

Funding provided by theBureau of Land ManagementEly District OfficeLincoln County Archaeological Initiative

People have lived in what is now Nevada for more than 11,000 years. For most of this time, they got food by fishing, hunting wild animals, and collecting wild plants like berries, roots, seeds, greens, and nuts. These people used tools made of stone, bone, shell, or wood. They also wove baskets, made pottery, and built houses – all from the natural materials they found around them.

By 2,000 years ago, the people who lived in what we call Lincoln County also grew plants in the sandy soil along the rivers, including maize (an early ancestor of corn) and, perhaps, beans and squash. Their maize wasn’t exactly like our modern corn, but it was still an important food, and being able to grow it themselves was a big advantage.

Maize cob fragment found in a rock shelter (actual size).

This petroglyph might represent a maize plant.

Beans.

Archaeology is the study of the people who lived on this land before us. Archaeologists explore the camps, villages, rock art, and other places where these ancient people left their mark on the land, trying to understand who they were and how they lived. Ancient people in North America left no written records, so our only clues are the remains of abandoned houses, broken tools, and discarded pottery. That’s why Archaeology is sometimes called the study of other people’s refuse.

What we throw away or leave behind says a lot about us: what we eat (and how much we waste), where we shop, how big our households are, and how long we have lived in the same place. The same is true of ancient people. A small, temporary camp site might have the remains of one or two houses, a few broken tools, and not much else, while a year-round village will have several houses, many cooking fire rings, a large number of dis-carded tools and toys, butchered animal bones, and perhaps even a few religious or ceremonial items. Those animal bones tell us what the villagers ate, and how far they had to go to get food. The way these people built their houses, the decorations they painted on their pottery, and how they made their rock art set them apart from their neighbors.

This large rock circle is all that remainsof an abandoned house.

This small rock circle was a cooking fire ring.Thi ll k i l

Sometimes, though, archaeologists find artifacts that don’t seem to match. Maybe there are two different styles of houses in one village, or pots with different kinds of decoration. Does this mean that two different groups of people lived in the same place? Did they live here at the same time, or at different times? Or did only one group live here, but changed the way they built their houses or painted their pottery? Why did they change? These are the kinds of questions archaeologists try to answer.

Different styles of pots with different kinds of decorations.Were they made by different groups?

Who Lived in Your Neighborhood 1,000 Years Ago?

“Fremont” isn’t the name of a tribe, like Apache, Paiute, or Shoshone. Fremont is a name archaeologists have given to a mysterious group (or groups) of ancient people who lived from about 1,500 to 800 years ago in what are now the states of Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. We don’t know how they were related to each other, but we do know that they had many things in common.

The Fremont were named for the Fremont River in Utah, where their camps were first discovered.

Time Line

One reason the Fremont are hard to define is that they seem to have changed the way they lived according to the situation.Sometimes they moved their homes from place to place follow-ing the seasonal ripening of important plants and the migration of game animals. At other times they settled at well-watered places and cultivated or tended plants like maize. Today we use our modern technology to make the land what we want it to be, but these ancient people had to change their lives to fit the land.

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Fremont Culture

How the Fremont lived depended on where they lived. Alongthe rivers and streams, where there was water for irrigation,they grew crops. They lived in small villages with several otherfarming families. Away from the rivers, in the drier regions,people relied more on hunting of animals and gathering of wildplants for their food. These “hunter-gatherers” had to movemove around a lot, going from hunting ground to hunting ground or und or from one patch of vegetation to the next.

Some groups probably were a combination of the two:o: sometimes they grew crops, and other times they relied on wild ed d plants and animals. It depended on local conditions such as how ch s how ow much rain fell each year, and how many people there were toweere tre to feed. Not only did different groups follow different lifestyles, tyltylyles, but these lifestyles changed over time. No wonder archaeolgistsaeolgists eolgistgistsneed to do a lot more work to understand it all.

Map of Fremont Territory

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The Fremont seem to have been somewhere betweennomadic and sedentary—archaeologists call this kind of lifesemi-sedentary. It means that many Fremont people were onlypart-time farmers, growing crops to supplement their wildfoods. Another word for part-time farmers is horticulturalists.

A nomadic group is one that moves from place to place, hunting, fishing, and gathering plant foods in different locations throughout the year.

A sedentary group is one that lives in one main village or camp year-round, with only short, occasional visits to other areas. Farmers are sedentary, because they need to stay close by to work their fields.

The Fremont lived in a rugged environment.

We know that people have lived in Utah and eastern Nevada for thousands of years, roaming through the deserts, mountains, and river valleys as small bands of hunter-gatherers in search of food, water, and shelter. The Fremont culture arose here at a time when there was more water available.

Those groups living along the edge of the Wasatch Plateau aboutut 1,500 - 2,500 years ago began to cultivate maize and other plants. It is likely that the maize seeds, and the know-how tow togrow them, came through trade with their neighbors to thesouth. Maize was grown in Mexico much earlier and was alreadyady an important crop to people in the southwestern United Statestateby 3,000 - 4,000 years ago.

Today, archaeologists travel the same areas looking for information about these ancient people.

Alongside horticulture, the Fremont started making pottery. Before that, they probably used baskets for cooking and storing food. They had a unique style of pottery called “gray ware.” Sometimes it has painted or textured designs. This pottery style ties all the Fremont people together. Everywhere the Fremont lived, archaeologists find pieces of this gray pottery. p g y p y

Fragments of Fremont gray ware pottery.

The Fremont were also using special large stones to grind seeds into flour. People now needed to be close to their fields to plant, irrigate, and harvest the crops, and so they became more sedentary. Being in one place most of the time meant that they could build more substantial houses, dig special pits to store their food supplies, and—because they didn’t have to carry all of their belongings from camp to camp—accumulate more “stuff.”

Over time, the houses got bigger, people started to grow beans and squash along with maize, and new items appeared such as moccasins made from the hide of deer or mountain sheep legs, clay “dolls” or figurines with fancy decorations, and distinctive styles of pottery, baskets, and rock art. These special traits mark the “classic” Fremont culture, especially in neighboring Utah.

An archaeologist recording a grinding stone at a rockshelter.

Close-up of grinding stone(GPS unit for scale).

The Fremont made beautiful and unique rock art. Much of it is of human-like figures with oddly shaped bodies and horn or feather headdresses. These large figures carved into or painted on rock can be found everywhere the Fremont lived. Some look as if they are wearing necklaces and earrings. Archaeologists are trying to relate rock art in Lincoln County to “classic” Fremont petroglyphs found in central Utah.

Unusual Pilling figurines (named after Clarence Pilling who found many of them) were also made by Fremont people. They have human shapes and are made out of unbaked clay. They are small, flat figurines and are only four to six inches long. Some of them still have traces of their original red, yellow, and black paint, which was made out of naturally colored clays and charcoal.

Clay Pilling figurine.

Fremont bone and shell ornaments similar to those in the necklace on the figurine.

Pahranagat Valley and Meadow Valley Wash: The Fremont in Your Neighborhood?

The Pahranagat Valley lies at the very edge of what we think of as the Fremont “zone.” Archaeologists have found pieces of the distinctive Fremont-style gray pottery and rock art in and around the Pahranagat Valley and Meadow Valley Wash. It is possible that Fremont pots were trade items brought here by local people, but it is also possible that it was made here.

Did the Fremont live in this area, or just pass through? We can’t yet say for sure. Archaeologists continue to work to answer this question.

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Fremont or Puebloan?

Most people recognize the name Anasazi, given to the ancient people who lived over a huge area of what we now call Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. These ancestors of the modern Pueblo people are famous for their irrigation farming, roads, pottery, pit houses, and stone and adobe dwellings often built along cliff walls. “Anasazi” is actually a Navajo word meaning “enemy ancestors.” Many Pueblo people today object to the name and prefer Puebloan.

Archaeologists think that the Fremont may have developed from the Puebloan culture—sort of their “country cousins.” Both groups made high-quality gray ware pottery, both grew maize, beans and squash, and both lived in pit-houses. In fact, the Fremont may have learned pottery making and maize cultivation from their Puebloan neighbors. But there were also many differences between the two cultures: for one, many of the Puebloans were true farmers living in established villages, while the Fremont were probably only part-time horticulturalists who grew some of their food, but hunted and gathered the rest. Also, the Fremont did not build anything like the grand stone architecture at Chaco Canyon or the amazing cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. Of the different Puebloan groups, those along the Virgin River (only 85 miles southeast of the Pahranagat Valley) were most like their Fremont neighbors, living in small, semi-sedentary groups and eating a wide variety of both wild and cultivated foods. And, for reasons we do not yet fully understand, the Fremont and the Puebloan people traded food, raw materials, and manufactured goods among themselves and perhaps with their neighbors in western Nevada, but not often with each other.

Puebloan cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado.Photo Courtesy of Deborah JonesP bl liff d lli t M V d C l d

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Where did the Fremont go?

One of the biggest mysteries about the Fremont people is what happened to them. For reasons we don’t yet understand, their way of life seems to have died out by about 600-800 years ago. Other artifacts and styles replaced the distinctive pottery, clay figurines and rock art we recognize as “Fremont.”

Many archaeologists think these changes happened because new groups of people moved into the areas of Utah and eastern Nevada, possibly forcing the Fremont to go elsewhere. These new people brought their own types of pottery, tools, and houses with them. Sometimes they lived in the same places where the Fremont had lived, and the new kinds of artifacts were mixed in with the old – making it harder for archaeologists to figure out who was who, and what was what.

But why did these newcomers appear, and what happened to the local people? We really don’t know. One theory has to do with climate change: there is a lot of evidence of long, severe droughts in many parts of the world about 1,000 to 500 years ago – harsh conditions that caused many human groups to change the way they lived. Food and water became more scarce, and people had to travel farther to find them. As conditions become too hot and dry for growing crops, horticulturalists like the Fremont would have had to abandon their fields and go back to being full-time hunters and gatherers.

Who came after the Fremont?

Early historical records show Southern Paiute people living in southern Nevada, southern Utah, and northern Arizona, and they still live in these areas today. Archaeologists are trying to figure out how and when these people “replaced” the Fremont. What we do know is that there were definite changes in pottery, rock art, and houses sometime around 600 years ago. Over hundreds of years, the Paiute have left behind artifacts and the remains of camps and villages that are also being studied by archaeologists.

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How ancient people behaved, and why they behaved that way, are two of the most important questions archaeologists try to answer: Why did some hunter-gatherers farm, and others did not? How did people interact with their neighbors? Were they friendly? Were they related? Did they trade with each other? How did past societies adapt to changes in their environment? What can that teach us about adapting to changes in our environment today?

Leave What You Find Help preserve the past: observe and photograph, but do not disturb archaeological resources, including artifacts and rock art.

Archaeological resources on public land are protected by a number of laws, including these:

The Antiquities Act

The Archaeological Resources Protection Act The National Historic Preservation Act The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

Some say, archaeology is the study of other people’s refuse. But it’s not the refuse that matters…it’s what it tells us about the people and how they lived. Because we still have so much to learn about the Fremont, the Paiute, and other Native peoples, it is extremely important to protect the artifacts, rock art, and village sites they left behind. No matter how large or small, they are important clues to learning about the past.

Archaeological Resources Protection ActIt is illegal to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise deface any archaeological resource located on public or Indian lands. Damage to archaeological sites is a felony punishable by fines and imprisonment.