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Show It is also important to remember that things were made to be used-worn, danced in, ridden. Many Indian-made things today are displayed in the clean and carefully lighted atmosphere of a museum or a gallery; therefore, it is important to provide the ingredient of imagination when looking at the everyday and special things in this exhibit. Yucca sandals did not hang on a wall but trudged squeaking across the flashing purple crystals of spring corn snow. A duck decoy once floated damply in the dawn while its owner waited tensely among lakeshore grasses for waterfowl to settle beside it. Hot coals and smoky pinyon nuts were tossed in a parching basket on a sunny autumn afternoon, while children laughed and played nearby. The physical properties of an environment provide the stage for and play critically important roles in shaping the cultures which take form in it. The place we call Utah today has within it, but does not completely contain, three major physiographic regions: the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin (Basin and Range Province), and the Colorado Plateau. The Great Basin is a semiarid and arid region of internal drainage containing dry basins filled with deep, fine sediments, ephemeral lakes, occasional marshes, and isolated remnants of the great inland waters which once nearly filled it. Its higher slopes are forested with juniper, aspen, pinyon, and other conifers and support large and small game and many birds. The Rocky Mountains are an area of great vertical relief with closely spaced life zones: the treeless alpine, forested subalpine, and montane regions. This is the part of the state which has a surplus of water; and its forests once harbored many elk, deer, bear, and other large mammals. The Colorado Plateau is a high tableland of flat-lying rocks, cut with thousands of deep canyons. It is, of course, important to remember that "Utah" is an arbitrary entity and that a discussion of Indian cultures can perhaps be divided along linguistic, temporal, or environmental lines but not by modern political boundaries. People living in the deep canyons, deserts, pinyon forests, and high mountains of what is now Utah constructed many different lifeways during the long human history of the region. The things that they made changed form over time, allowing historians and archaeologists to discover or impose patterns. Historians see areal differences and temporal developments- distinctive combinations and clusters of traits-and assign names to them: Anasazi, Fremont, Archaic, Shoshoni, Ute. The complex variety and richness of the cultural history of the area can perhaps best be glimpsed through a discussion of some bits of its material culture, ancient and modern, and our current conception of its context. A most ancient and enduring lifeway found within Utah was the one that some scholars called "Desert" or "Great Basin Archaic." The dry caves and rock shelters of 4 |