OCR Text |
Show the Great Basin have yielded artifacts constructed over ten thousand years ago by people living a life probably not unlike that of the nineteenth-century Paiute people. "Desert" traditions were characterized by a broad adaptive adjustment to a chronically dry environment. A critically important survival skill was the ability to transform grasses, shrubs, and low trees into the tools and utensils needed in day-to-day life. Salix, Apocynum, As-clepias, Artemisia, Juniperus, Yucca, and other fibers were twisted, coiled, and twined to make cordage, soft bags, rabbit nets, burden baskets, water jugs, cooking bowls, winnowing and parching trays, mats, and a variety of other necessary objects. One amazing artifact that clearly illustrates the Great Basin dwellers' creative use of available plant resources is a duck decoy recovered in a cave in west-central Nevada, near the western verge of the Great Basin (Fig. 7). The people who used Lovelock Cave, probably as a cache site, evidently lived on the margins of nearby Humboldt Lake and depended on its fish and waterfowl for some of their food. The delicate and precise craftsmanship of this piece evidences the observant eye and skilled hands of its maker and reveals its importance as a means of acquiring a meal (Fig. 8). Another Utah lifeway, the Fremont Culture, was first defined and named in the 1930s during an archaeological survey of the Fremont drainage area. Fremont people lived throughout most of Utah. They shared many culture traits that together perhaps represent a blend of Anasazi and Northwestern Plains elements that they adapted to the specific environmental conditions in which they found themselves. We know that they were horticulturalists who raised some corn, beans, and squash and employed check dams and other water-control devices to do so. They evidently significantly enlarged their diet with game, wild plants, and the fish and birds they found in adjacent marshlands; wore leather garments and distinctive moccasins; and wove baskets and other textiles. We also know that they were fine ceramicists whose fired pottery-that most durable and persistent of materials-survives as shards and, rarely, as whole vessels. Archaeologists currently define three major ceramic traditions and at least ten pottery types in the Fremont area.4 Snake Valley Corrugated pieces illustrate the futility of formally segregating art from utility when examining Indian artifacts. The sturdy graceful forms and integrated stippled and dimpled surfaces of this "cooking ware" (Fig. 9) are enormously appealing to our twentieth-century aesthetic. Both Fremont and Archaic people manufactured enigmatic clay figurines who stare down the years at us through shuttered, elongated eyes (Fig. 10). The curious male and female anthropomorphic figures, formed of originally unfired clays with (in 5 |