| OCR Text |
Show , : frtj/flj (J HJl A FREMONT RETROSPECTIVE JOHN P. MARWITT University of Akron ABSTRACT Although archeological research in Formative level siles located north of the Colorado and Virgin rivers has been going on lor well over 100 years, there is still no general agreement among researchers on the number ol "cultures'1 represented in the region, nor is there any apparent consensus on such things as origins, subsistence techniques, internal cultural connections, chronology, or relationships with the Southwest. Reasons lor the rather large numher ol currently competing interpretations include: the persistence of early ideas about the cultural provenience of the eastern Great Basin/western Colorado Plateau, the lack until recently of systematic, problem-oriented research in the area, and to some extent, a difference in perception between investigators who were trained in the Great Basin and those who received their archeological training in the Southwest. It is just a little more that 100 years since archeological work began in the region of Utah north of the Colorado and Virgin rivers. Most of the investigations carried out before the turn of the century (Severance 1874- Putnam 1876; Palmer 1876, 1878; Montgomery 1894) were primarily antiquarian in nature and contributed very little data that is still useful today, but more scientific studies of what eventually came to be called the "northern periphery of the Southwest" have a very respectable antiquity as well, beginning in the first third of the present century with the pioneering survey and excavations of Judd in the eastern Great Basin, Fewkes in the northeastern part of Utah, and culminating in Morss' (1931) definition of the Fremont culture in the central part of the state. In the 50 years or so since, most of Utah and contiguous portions of surrounding states have been surveyed, many hundreds of sites have been recorded and sampled, and several dozen have been extensively excavated. There would be no point in reviewing all of the archeo-ogical work carried out in the northern three quarters of Utah and adjacent parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada. The particulars have been summarized several times, notably by Wormington (1955), Aikens (1966b) and Gunnerson(1969). Moreover, severaloftheotherpapers in this symposium treat such things as origins, subsistence, and cultural variation in a historic framework. t seems to me to be more useful to take stock of all the research expended to date, to see where we stand in our attempts to understand and explain prehistoric cultural developments in the Fremont area, and to speculate on what might be some of the reasons for the notable lack of consensus to be found among those of us who have studied the Fremont. It is a striking but sad fact that the many man-years that we and others have spent in the field and the laboratory, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of other peoples' money expended by archeologists in studying the Fremont have so far produced very little in the way of agreement on the nature of the prehistoric phenomena we have been dealing with. For the last 25 years at least, Fremont research has been notable for a large number of competing interpretative schemata. Wormington (1955), Aikens (1966b), Ambler (1967), Gunnerson (1969),' Marwitt (1970) and Madsen and Lindsay (1977), to mention only some of the most recent, have all provided us with syntheses of eastern Great Basin-western Colorado Plateau prehistory. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that someone unfamiliar with the geographical area and general time period under discussion might have real difficulty in recognizing that all of these authors deal with broadly similar data and all of them are attempting reconstruction of roughly the same set of cultural patterns. To begin with, we cannot seem to agree on a label or a set of labels to identify the cultural unit (or units) we are investigating. Perhaps the label with the widest current usage is "Fremont," but it is probably obvious to even the most casual reader of the relevant literature that the term "Fremont" means different things to different people. Aikens (1966b), Ambler (1967), and Marwitt (1970) apply the term most broadly so as to include all of the pottery-making, variably sedentary, variably horticultural populations north of the Colorado and Virgin rivers, distinct from the Anasazi of the Southwest. Wormington (1955). Gunnerson (1969), and Madsen and Lindsay (1977) all restrict Fremont culture to the region east of the Wasatch Plateau, and employ such terms as "Sevier Culture" and/ or "Puebloid" to refer to the contemporaneous occupation of the eastern Great Basin by peoples whom they regard as having had more or less distinct patterns ol culture. Madsen and Lindsay further propose that an unnamed Plains-derived culture may have occupied the northern part of the Fremont area as the term is used by Aikens, Ambler, and me, Thus, the label "Fremont" has been applied liberally, more or less as it seemed fit to each author depending on his own biases and/or preconceptions, each with his own point to make. It is no wonder that a degree of confusion has resulted. It might be interesting to speculate on what would follow from frequent redefinition and manipulation, arbitrary or not, of better-known though roughly equivalent labels such as "Anasazi" or "Hopewell." This is not to suggest that Anasazi, Hopewell, or Fremont should not be subjected to revision as required by new data, but it is a little exasperating to have "Fremont" undergo a metamorphosis every few years. In large part, the confusion surrounding use of the term "Fremont" is occasioned by the variability of archeological remains from area to area within the general region under discussion. In our attempts to divide the hodgepodge of assemblages from north and west of the Colorado river into named units or "variants," Ambler and 1 used the term as a designator for the whole comprised of a system of broadly similar local or regional cultures. With the clarity of hindsight, it may be that employment of the term "variant" has been unfortunate insofar as it has created the impression that there was some kind of original or pure "Ur-Fremont" of which the local/regional variants were refractions. My own use of Fremont was mainly as a convenient device to organize the archeological remains over a large and environmentally diverse area and oppose them to the cultures of the Southwest. Unfortunately I implied that Fremont was a uniform entity at a higher level of reality than variant, and that it had cultural coherence in itself, apart from being just the sum of its regional expressions. Formal definition of Fremont culture seemed unnecessary at the time since the purpose of my monograph was to organize diversity, not to demonstrate a unitary Fremont culture. In fact, a formal definition of Fremont is still not necessary for me, and I would tend to agree with Madsen and Lindsay (1977:90) that it is probably impossible to define a unitary Fremont. Rather than the five related variants proposed by Ambler, or my rather different system, Madsen and Lindsay (1977), using substantially the same body of data, distinguish two separate cultural entities. According to them, the Fremont culture is confined to the Colorado Plateau, and the Sevier culture represents an adaptation to the Great Basin. The two cultures are taxonomically equal to each other, and presumably to archeological cultures of I he Southwest, such as Anasazi or Sinagua. This schema represents a major return (though not necessarily a retreat) to interpretations current 20 years ago, and has the advantage ol correlating what they see as major adaptive diilercnces, especially in subsistence, with the major physiographic provinces of the region. Additionally, Madsen and Lindsay suggest that a third culture, unnamed and derived from the Great Plains, can be distinguished in the area of the Great Salt Lake and the Uinta Basin. While they recognize that there is geographically based cultural variation in both their Fremont and Sevier cultures (part of it resulting from an overlay of Great Plains traits in the north), they soft-pedal local/regional differences in the interest of strengthening the internal coherence of each culture so that the two can be compared and contrasted, especially in regard to settlement pattern and subsistence techniques. Temporal variation in each culture is also acknowledged, but apparently it is presumed to have been substantially uniform for each cultural tradition. For the eastern Great Basin, they suggest that local phases defined for the Parowan valley (Marwitt 1970) may extend over the whole Sevier occupational area. My aim here is not to evaluate the merits of one interpretation of Great Basin-Colorado Plateau regional variation as opposed to another nor to make a last-ditch defense of my own schema, now almost 10 years old. Rather, given that variation in economic orientation, settlement pattern, and material culture is well-documented, 1 have to conclude that more than one defensible interpretation of the data is possible. Indeed, the range of possible interpretations is by no means limited to my model along with that of Ambler and Madsen and Lindsay. For example, Claudia Berry (personal communication 1978) believes that a fair case can be made for Fremont being primarily a central Utah phenomenon centered in the geologically, physiographically, and environmentally transitional zone where the eastern Great Basin grades into the Colorado Plateau, with a relatively few village sites scattered outside the core area. This would exclude most of the sites that Ambler and 1 assigned to Uinta Fremont along with those I placed in the Great Salt Lake variant, which she regards as non- Fremont. As she sees it, the majority of sites and the focus of most economic and other activities would be associated with the relatively rich resource zones of the high plateaus. Villages would be found in valleys with arable land, a dependable water supply, arid a relatively long growing season. At present Berry is not proposing yet another model for Fremont, but as she n otes, an emphasis on the central area helps explain distribution of traits like basalt-tempered pottery (whether called Sevier or Emery) and lvie Creek B/ W ware. 1 can add that it might also help to clarify the provenience of sites like Snake Rock, Old Woman, 10 and Poplar Knob, which arc culturally mixed or transitional between my Sevier and San Rafael variants, and which would also be difficult to accommodate in either the Fremont or Sevier cultures as defined by Madsen and Lindsay. So, for the present, we have two competing uses of Fremont associated with two alternative models of regional/ cultural variation and also perhaps Claudia Berry's fledgling hypothesis waiting to acquire strength through the accumulation of supporting data before it emerges to compete for acceptance as a model. None of these schemata is so heterodox as to exclude itself from serious consideration, and each of them has its own weaknesses. But none of the three is persuasive to the extent that ii can displace its competitors. We find a similar situation when we consider alternative models of Fremonl origins and subsislence. Other papers in this symposium deal in depth with these topics, and 1 will mention them only in outline. As far as cultural origins are concerned, we can chose from a smorgasbord of hypotheses. Included are a purported influx of Southwestern peoples (Gunnerson 1969), a movement of Great Plains peoples into the region followed by the acquisition of Southwestern culture traits such as masonry architecture, pottery, and horticulture (Aikens 1966b; Sharrock 1966), and in situ development from a differentiated Archaic base to which the Southwest- derived traits were added (Wormington 1955; Jennings 1956; 1978a). The source of the Southwestern traits includes the Anasazi on a Pueblo II time level (Gunnerson 1969), and more remotely from Mogollon or Hohokam, perhaps as early as AD. 500 (Marwitt 1970; Jennings 1978a). There are also several variations and permutations of these origin hypotheses. There has been substantial agreement ever since M orss defined the Fremont culture, that subsistence patterns in • both the eastern Great Basin and the western Colorado Plateau were less horticulturally dependent than in the Southwest. At issue now is the extent to which we can see different combinations of horticulture, hunting, and gathering of wild plants in the two main physiographic provinces and in the northern Utah-Uinta Basin area. My own view, based on little direct subsistence data (Marwitt 1970) is that the pattern was very flexible over the entire region and that the proportion of horticulture vs. exploitation of wild plant and animal resources in any one area or locality was a function of fluctuating local environmental conditions and would have changed from time to time, perhaps frequently. As most others did before me, 1 em- . phasized village horticulture as overall the most important subsistence strategy except in the Uinta Basin and northern Utah where horticulture appears only to have supplemented an economic system centered on hunting bison and waterfowl and collecting wild plants. This is essentially the orthodox view, which has recently been challenged by Madsen and Lindsay (1977). They agree that subsistence in the Uinta Basin and the area of the Great Salt Lake was characterized by a primary reliance on wild species, and also that populations to the south were sedentary, at least part of the year. However, using new pollen and plant macro-fossil data, they argue that horticulture wasdominant only in the Colorado Plateau (Fremont) region. Sedenlariness, in the Great Basin (Sevier) region was maintained by heavy exploitation ol marsh resources, especially cattails, and was only supplemented by maize horticulture and hunting. It is largely on the basts ol these supposedly distinct subsistence patterns that they propose separate Fremont and Sevier cultural patterns. In soliciting papers for this symposium, the editor asked in vain for a contribution on the demise of the Fremont. The lack ol response is not a sign that the fate of the culture is so well-known and understood that il needs no further debate. Instead of a relative wealth of controlled data and an embarrassment of interpretations such as exist with regard to Fremont subsistence or regional variation in material culture, there is little hard evidence to be brought to bear on the fate of the Basin- Plateau cullure(s) after A.D 1200 or so. In his recent summary of Utah pre-hislory, Jennings (1978a) makes almost no mention of possible reasons for the disappearance of Fremont peoples. More or less by default, Aikens'( 1966b) hypothesis of Fremont withdrawal from their Utah heartland eastward into the Great Plains under pressure from a (linguistically and archeologically demonstrated) Shoshonean expansion out of the southeastern Great Basin remains the main currency of discussion, although few would agree in full with Aikens' hypothesis that the Fremont merged with late Plains culture to form the Dismal River culture of the Central Plains. But in view of the many correspondences noted by Aikens between Fremont and late prehistoric Plains manifestations, it appears not unlikely that some Fremont or Fremont-influenced groups (especially those of the northern region) drifted on to the northwestern plains of Wyoming and perhaps southern Montana. In an unpublished paper, Michael Berry (n.d.) suggests that the Shoshoneans may have been able to gradually replace horticultural populations in the southeastern Basin beginning after A.D.I000 by denying them access to critical wild resource zones such as the pinyon forests, on which they depended seasonally and/or in years when crops failed. As permanent residents of these zones, the Shoshoneans would have had a competitive edge over the Fremonters who ventured into them on an intermittent basis. Berry makes no claim that this model would apply to all of the Basin-Plateau horticultural populations, but observes that at least it is a testable proposition. Gunnerson (1962, 1969) has attempted to account for the demise of the Basin-Plateau horticulturalists (and the Virgin branch Anasazi as well) by identifying these groups as ancestral Plateau Shoshoneans who migrated north from the Virgin branch about A. D.950 as part of a general Pueblo 11 expansion and who became the Fremont peoples. Following a drought which began at about A.D. 1200 and required the abandonment of horticulture, both the Fremont and Virgin branch peoples returned to a foraging lifeway and dispersed to become the Shoshone, 11 Comanche, Ulc, Southern Paiute, Northern Paiute and related Plateau Shoshoneans contacted by Euroame'rican explorers. 1 his theory has been rejected by most authorities as inconsistent with abundant archeological and linguistic cv.dence which suggests not deculturation of indigenous groups but replacement of Fremont and Virgin branch populations by the modern inhabitants of the region (see Aikens 1970a for a review of the data). At the last Fremont symposium held in 1970, one of the most provocative issues, at least potentially was dating the emergence of Fremont patterns. Bui for some reason the expected debate on dating never took place Al that time, Fremont specialists were divided into two n o m ; ° n , e , / e p r e S e n t e d b y A m b , e r <1970)' Breternitz (1970b), and Gunnerson (1969), held that Fremont culture could be recognized no earlier than A.D.900-1000 The opposition, which included Fry (1970a), Aikens (1966b 1970b), and me (Marwitt 1970), maintained that Fremont could be dated to as early as A.D. 400-500 in the Great Salt Lake area, and to before A.D.600 in the Uinta Basin. While both camps have been silent on dating the Fremont for several years now, the controversy is not settled as yet. The early dates are all from the northern area and while there are now additional C-14 age determinations in support of early occupation of the north, the cultural provenience of the assemblages in question is open to some doubt. As noted above, Claudia Berry (personal communication 1978)and Madsen and Lindsay (1977) provisionally identify most of the northern Utah-Uinta Basin material as non-Fremont, possibly of Plains origin If they are correct, then the 1970 controversy was not over dating the Fremont at all. In the central and southern ^ n n n e a H i e S t ^ f°T F r C m 0 n t f a l 1 i n t h e P™od A.D 700-900, and if Fremont (or Fremont and Sevier) occupation was in fact largely limited to this geographic area, the beginning date for the culture(s) would be closer to the Ambler-Breternitz-Gunnerson estimate, and presumably more acceptable to them. There has been little progress in the last few years toward developing an internal chronology of culture change for either the Great Basin or the Colorado Plateau Berry (1972) has slightly adjusted my dating of phases for the Parowan valley (Marwitt 1970), and Schroedl and Hogan (1975) have proposed a Book Cliff phase with an assumed range of A.D.900-1200 for the Uinta Basin But we still know almost nothing of the sequence of culture change for the Great Basin from the south end of the Great Salt Lake to the Parowan valley, or for the Colorado Plateau between the Uinta Basin and the Colorado and Virgin rivers. The above is only a sample of the lack of consensus that continues to plague (or perhaps to grace) the study of prehistory in the Fremont area. We cannot agree on cultural origins, chronology, the kind and amount of internal cultural variation, subsistence and land-use patterns external cultural relations, or the ultimate fate of the human societies wearestudying. Nordo we even have a standard term.nology l o r the cultural complex we are investigating. 1 hese are all fundamental requirements for coherent archeological reconstruction. One of the reasons for the seeming disarray in our ranks is the absence until recently of a problem orientation and clearly defined research strategies. Some of the most important and informative Fremont sites were excavated to fulfill the terms of salvage contracts, because they were endangered by relic-hunters, or were chosen for ex-cavat. on because they satisfied the requirements of a summer field school for a complex site with a variety of archeological remains. Such considerations by no means preclude doing good archeology, but they do tend to result in a dilfuse research effort with no clear focus on contributing specific data toward the solution of old problems. Wilh regard to the multiplicity of competing interpretations of Fremont culture, it is interesting to note that of the six Fremont syntheses mentioned near the beginning ol this paper, all but one are doctoral dissertations, representing five different universities. In addition, four of the six append a more or less revolutionary interpretation or ^interpretation of Fremont culture to a descriptive site report. Could it be that we are dealing with an archeology analog to the well-known situation in ethnography in which the exotic or unusual aspects of a culture are emphasized to point up the ethnographer's "people" as uniquely interesting and important? Doctoral candidates in archeology are required to make original contributions to their field, and they might sometimes see in their own data a hook on which to hang a new interpretation of the rremont culture. I do not mean to be overly critical of the dissertation syntheses, especially since 1 am responsible for one of them myself. Indeed, it is vital to reexamine old data from new points of view, and new syntheses tend to stimulate fruitful discussion. As J.D. Jennings (personal communication 1978) put it recently: "• • • we must keep turning the compost heap over and over in order to get a rich, ripe, and aromatic product eventually developed. 1 think every time Ambler, you or Madsen fork it all through again, we come nearer to a full understanding, partly because every time it is re-iorked, some new material is mixed in with the old." In contrast to the situation in some areas of North America, the work of the archeologist who deals with the Fremont culture is not the dreary production of corroborative data or mere gap-filling. There are still many basic questions to answer and the likelihood of continued disagreement among researchers on important issues. I would therefore predict that the "Friends of the Fremont-will be a contentious lot for some time to come 12 |
