Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin
The Indigenous Peoples of the Great Basin are Native Americans of the northern Great Basin, Snake River Plain, upper Colorado River basin. The "Great Basin" is a cultural classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas and a cultural region located between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, in what is now Nevada, parts of Oregon, Idaho and Utah; the Great Basin region at the time of European contact was ~400,000 sq mi. There is little precipitation in the Great Basin area which affects the lifestyles and cultures of the inhabitants. Original inhabitants of the region may have arrived by 12,000 BCE. 9,000 BCE to 400 CE marks the Great Basin Desert Archaic Period, following by the time of the Fremont culture, who were hunter-gatherers, as well as agriculturalists. Numic language-speakers, ancestors of today's Western Shoshone and both Northern and Southern Paiute peoples entered the region around the 14th century CE; the first Europeans to reach the area was the Spanish Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, who passed far from present day Delta, Utah in 1776.
Great Basin settlement was free of non-Native settlers until the first Mormon settlers arrived in 1847. Within ten years, the first Indian reservation was established, in order to assimilate the native population; the Goshute Reservation was created in 1863. The attempted acculturation process included sending children to Indian schools and limiting the landbases and resources of the reservations; because their contact with European-Americans and African-Americans occurred comparatively late, Great Basin tribes maintain their religion and culture and were leading proponents of 19th century cultural and religious renewals. Two Paiute prophets and Wovoka, introduced the Ghost Dance in a ceremony to commune with departed loved ones and bring renewal of buffalo herds and precontact lifeways; the Ute Bear Dance emerged on the Great Basin. The Sun Dance and Peyote religion flourished in the Great Basin, as well. In 1930, the Ely Shoshone Reservation was established, followed by the Duckwater Indian Reservation in 1940.
Conditions for the Native American population of the Great Basin were erratic throughout the 20th century. Economic improvement emerged as a result of President Franklin Roosevelt's Indian New Deal in the 1930s, while activism and legal victories in the 1970s have improved conditions significantly; the communities continue to struggle against chronic poverty and all of the resulting problems: unemployment. Today self-determination, beginning with the 1975 passage of the Indian Self-determination and Education Assistance Act, has enabled Great Basin tribes to develop economic opportunities for their members. Different ethnic groups of Great Basin tribes share certain common cultural elements that distinguish them from surrounding groups. All but the Washoe traditionally speak Numic languages, tribal groups, who lived peacefully and shared common territories, have intermingled considerably. Prior to the 20th century, Great Basin peoples were predominantly gatherers. "Desert Archaic" or more "The Desert Culture" refers to the culture of the Great Basin tribes.
This culture is characterized by the need for mobility to take advantage of seasonally available food supplies. The use of pottery was rare due to its weight, but intricate baskets were woven for containing water, cooking food, winnowing grass seeds and storage—including the storage of pine nuts, a Paiute-Shoshone staple. Heavy items such as metates would be cached rather than carried from foraging area to foraging area. Agriculture was not practiced within the Great Basin itself, although it was practiced in adjacent areas; the Great Basin tribes had no permanent settlements, although winter villages might be revisited winter after winter by the same group of families. In the summer, the largest group was the nuclear family due to the low density of food supplies. In the early historical period the Great Basin tribes were expanding to the north and east, where they developed a horse-riding bison-hunting culture; these people, including the Bannock and Eastern Shoshone share traits with Plains Indians.
Great Basin Native Artists, a collective of indigenous artists from the Great Basin Great Basin artwork in Infinity of Nations, National Museum of the American Indian
Rochester Rock Art Panel
The Rochester Rock Art Panel consists of a large number of petroglyphs of various ages. Some are prehistoric rock art of Fremont culture origin. Others are modern, depicting horses, for example, and some are of recent origin, most the work of white explorers, and/or tourists. There is a great deal of graffiti near the main panel, of recent origin; the majority of the panel is covered with a dark desert varnish which contrasts nicely with the light sandstone, exposed when the petroglyphs are pecked into the surface. There are several sections of light stone in the center of the panel where it appears some of original stone was removed by collectors who were after the figures inscribed there; the panel is located 3 miles east of Emery, Utah but is accessed via a graded road coming from a turnoff to the north, near the town of Moore. To get to the panel drive to the turnoff between mile markers 16 and 17 on highway 10 between the towns of Emery and Ferron. Take the paved road heading east to Moore for about half a mile.
Turn south onto a well-graded road and drive for about 4 miles, passing a radio tower on the way. From the parking lot an obvious hiking trail of about a half mile leads along the side of a small canyon to the panel. Rochester and Molen Rock ArtGigapan at http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/78627/
Idaho
Idaho is a state in the northwestern region of the United States. It borders the state of Montana to the east and northeast, Wyoming to the east and Utah to the south, Washington and Oregon to the west. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canadian border with the province of British Columbia. With a population of 1.7 million and an area of 83,569 square miles, Idaho is the 14th largest, the 12th least populous and the 7th least densely populated of the 50 U. S. states. The state's capital and largest city is Boise. Idaho prior to European settlement was inhabited by Native American peoples, some of whom still live in the area. In the early 19th century, Idaho was considered part of the Oregon Country, an area disputed between the U. S. and the United Kingdom. It became U. S. territory with the signing of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, but a separate Idaho Territory was not organized until 1863, instead being included for periods in Oregon Territory and Washington Territory. Idaho was admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, becoming the 43rd state.
Forming part of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho is divided into several distinct geographic and climatic regions. In the state's north, the isolated Idaho Panhandle is linked with Eastern Washington, with which it shares the Pacific Time Zone – the rest of the state uses the Mountain Time Zone; the state's south includes the Snake River Plain, while the south-east incorporates part of the Great Basin. Idaho is quite mountainous, contains several stretches of the Rocky Mountains; the United States Forest Service holds about 38 % of the most of any state. Industries significant for the state economy include manufacturing, mining and tourism. A number of science and technology firms are either headquartered in Idaho or have factories there, the state contains the Idaho National Laboratory, the country's largest Department of Energy facility. Idaho's agricultural sector supplies many products, but the state is best known for its potato crop, which comprises around one-third of the nationwide yield; the official state nickname is the "Gem State".
The name's origin remains a mystery. In the early 1860s, when the United States Congress was considering organizing a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested the name "Idaho", which he claimed was derived from a Shoshone language term meaning "the sun comes from the mountains" or "gem of the mountains". Willing claimed he had invented the name. Congress decided to name the area Colorado Territory when it was created in February 1861. Thinking they would get a jump on the name, locals named a community in Colorado "Idaho Springs". However, the name "Idaho" did not fall into obscurity; the same year Congress created Colorado Territory, a county called Idaho County was created in eastern Washington Territory. The county was named after a steamship named Idaho, launched on the Columbia River in 1860, it is unclear after Willing's claim was revealed. Regardless, part of Washington Territory, including Idaho County, was used to create Idaho Territory in 1863.
Despite this lack of evidence for the origin of the name, many textbooks well into the 20th century repeated as fact Willing's account the name "Idaho" derived from the Shoshone term "ee-da-how". A 1956 Idaho history textbook says:"Idaho" is a Shoshoni Indian exclamation; the word consists of three parts. The first is "Ee", which in English conveys the idea of "coming down"; the second is "dah", the Shoshoni stem or root for both "sun" and "mountain". The third syllable, "how", denotes the exclamation and stands for the same thing in Shoshoni that the exclamation mark does in the English language; the Shoshoni word is "Ee-dah-how", the Indian thought thus conveyed when translated into English means, "Behold! the sun coming down the mountain. An alternative etymology attributes the name to the Plains Apache word "ídaahę́", used in reference to The Comanche. Idaho borders six U. S. states and one Canadian province. The states of Washington and Oregon are to the west and Utah are to the south, Montana and Wyoming are to the east.
Idaho shares a short border with the Canadian province of British Columbia to the north. The landscape is rugged with some of the largest unspoiled natural areas in the United States. For example, at 2.3 million acres, the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area is the largest contiguous area of protected wilderness in the continental United States. Idaho is a Rocky Mountain state with scenic areas; the state has snow-capped mountain ranges, vast lakes and steep canyons. The waters of the Snake River rush through the deepest gorge in the United States. Shoshone Falls plunges down rugged cliffs from a height greater than Niagara Falls; the major rivers in Idaho are the Snake River, the Clark Fork/Pend Oreille River, the Clearwater River, the Salmon River. Other significant rivers include the Coeur d'Alene River, the Spokane River, the Boise River, the Payette River; the Salmon River empties into the Snake in Hells Canyon and forms the southern boundary of Nez Perce County on its north shore, of which Lewiston is the county seat.
The Port of Lewiston, at the confluence of the Clearwater and the Snake Rivers is the farthest inland seaport on the West Coast at 465 river miles from the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon. Idaho's highest point is 12,662 ft, in the Lost River Range north of Mackay. Idaho's lowest poi
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer is a human living in a society in which most or all food is obtained by foraging. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change have been displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. In West Eurasia, agriculture lead to widespread genetic changes when older hunter-gatherer populations were replaced by Middle Eastern farmers during the Neolithic who in turn were overrun by Indo-Europeans during the Bronze Age. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, many supplement their foraging activity with horticulture or pastoralism. During the 1970s, Lewis Binford suggested that early humans were obtaining food via scavenging, not hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in forests and woodlands, which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs and fruits besides scavenging.
Rather than killing large animals for meat, according to this view, they used carcasses of such animals that had either been killed by predators or that had died of natural causes. Archaeological and genetic data suggest that the source populations of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers survived in sparsely wooded areas and dispersed through areas of high primary productivity while avoiding dense forest cover. According to the endurance running hypothesis, long-distance running as in persistence hunting, a method still practiced by some hunter-gatherer groups in modern times, was the driving evolutionary force leading to the evolution of certain human characteristics; this hypothesis does not contradict the scavenging hypothesis: both subsistence strategies could have been in use – sequentially, alternating or simultaneously. Hunting and gathering was the subsistence strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus, from its appearance some 0.2 million years ago by Homo sapiens.
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers lived in groups that consisted of several families resulting in a size of a few dozen people. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago, after this was replaced only with the spread of the Neolithic Revolution. Starting at the transition between the Middle to Upper Paleolithic period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherers bands began to specialize, concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of game and gathering a smaller selection of food; this specialization of work involved creating specialized tools such as fishing nets and bone harpoons. The transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture originated as early as 12,000 years ago in the Middle East, independently originated in many other areas including Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and the Andes. Forest gardening was being used as a food production system in various parts of the world over this period.
Forest gardens originated in prehistoric times along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of monsoon regions. In the gradual process of families improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified and improved, whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Superior introduced species were selected and incorporated into the gardens. Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have continually declined as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Many of them reside in arid regions or tropical forests. Areas that were available to hunter-gatherers were—and continue to be—encroached upon by the settlements of agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas. In addition, Jared Diamond has blamed a decline in the availability of wild foods animal resources. In North and South America, for example, most large mammal species had gone extinct by the end of the Pleistocene—according to Diamond, because of overexploitation by humans, one of several explanations offered for the Quaternary extinction event there.
As the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they expanded into lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers. This process of agriculture-driven expansion led to the development of the first forms of government in agricultural centers, such as the Fertile Crescent, Ancient India, Ancient China, Sub-Saharan Africa and Norte Chico; as a result of the now near-universal human reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures live in areas unsuitable for agricultural use. Archaeologists can use evidence such as stone tool use to track hunter-gatherer activities, including mobility. Most hunter-gatherers are semi-nomadic and live in temporary settlements. Mobile communities construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available; some hunter-gatherer cultures, such as the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the Yakuts, lived in rich environments that allowed them to be sedentary or semi-sedentary.
Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos, although settled hunter-gatherers are an exception to this rule. Nearly
Fremont Indian State Park and Museum
Fremont Indian State Park and Museum is a state park of Utah, US, which interprets archaeological remains of the Fremont culture. The park is located in Utah in the Clear Creek Canyon; the park directly adjoins Interstate 70 as it travels up the Clear Creek Canyon, thus is accessible by auto. The nearest town with full services is Richfield. There are campgrounds and RV parks in the area as well; the site was discovered during construction of Interstate 70, thousands of artifacts have been excavated from the ancient village and put on permanent display at the museum there. The museum offers hiking trails and picnic areas; the Fremont Indians were agriculturalists who lived from about 400 to 1300 in north and central Utah and adjacent parts of Colorado and Nevada. The Fremont are thought to have come from hunter-gatherers who lived in this location and were influenced by the Ancient Pueblo Peoples who introduced corn and pottery, making year-round settlements possible. Media related to Fremont Indian State Park and Museum at Wikimedia Commons Fremont Indian State Park and Museum
Fremont River (Utah)
Fremont River is 95-mile long river in southeastern Utah, United States that flows from the Johnson Valley Reservoir, located on the Wasatch Plateau near Fish Lake, southeast through Capitol Reef National Park to the Muddy Creek near Hanksville where the two rivers combine to form the Dirty Devil River, a tributary of the Colorado River. The Johnson Valley Reservoir is fed by Lake Creek; the Fremont River passes through Fremont, Lyman, Bicknell and Torrey and provides year round irrigation for the agricultural lands of Rabbit Valley and Caineville. It heads through Hanksville and afterwards to its mouth; the Fremont River has a drainage area of 751 square miles fed by spring snowmelt off Thousand Lake Mountain, Boulder Mountain, the northern Henry Mountains. The river is named after John Charles Fremont, it gives its name to a Precolumbian archaeological culture. Flow, by month, at Bicknell gauging station: List of Utah rivers List of tributaries of the Colorado River Media related to Fremont River at Wikimedia Commons
Rock art
In archaeology, rock art is human-made markings placed on natural stone. A global phenomenon, rock art is found in many culturally diverse regions of the world, it has been produced in many contexts throughout human history, although the majority of rock art, ethnographically recorded has been produced as a part of ritual. Such artworks are divided into three forms: petroglyphs, which are carved into the rock surface, which are painted onto the surface, earth figures, formed on the ground; the oldest known rock art dates from the Upper Palaeolithic period, having been found in Europe, Australia and Africa. Archaeologists studying these artworks believe that they had magico-religious significance; the archaeological sub-discipline of rock art studies first developed in the late-19th century among Francophone scholars studying the Upper Palaeolithic rock art found in the cave systems of Western Europe. Rock art continues to be of importance to indigenous peoples in various parts of the world, who view them as both sacred items and significant components of their cultural patrimony.
Such archaeological sites are significant sources of cultural tourism, have been utilised in popular culture for their aesthetic qualities. Found in literate cultures, a rock relief or rock-cut relief is a relief sculpture carved on solid or "living rock" such as a cliff, rather than a detached piece of stone, they are a category of rock art, sometimes found in conjunction with rock-cut architecture. However, they tend to be omitted in most works on rock art, which concentrate on engravings and paintings by prehistoric peoples. A few such works exploit the natural contours of the rock and use them to define an image, but they do not amount to man-made reliefs. Rock reliefs have been made in many cultures, were important in the art of the Ancient Near East. Rock reliefs are fairly large, as they need to be to make an impact in the open air. Most have figures that are over life-size, in many the figures are multiples of life-size. Stylistically they relate to other types of sculpture from the culture and period concerned, except for Hittite and Persian examples they are discussed as part of that wider subject.
The vertical relief is most common, but reliefs on horizontal surfaces are found. The term excludes relief carvings inside caves, whether natural or themselves man-made, which are found in India. Natural rock formations made into statues or other sculpture in the round, most famously at the Great Sphinx of Giza, are usually excluded. Reliefs on large boulders left in their natural location, like the Hittite İmamkullu relief, are to be included, but smaller boulders may be called stelae or carved orthostats; the term rock art appears in the published literature as early as the 1940s. It has been described as "rock carvings", "rock drawings", "rock engravings", "rock inscriptions", "rock paintings", "rock pictures", "rock records" "rock sculptures; the defining characteristic of rock art is. As such, rock art is a form of landscape art, includes designs that have been placed on boulder and cliff faces, cave walls and ceilings, on the ground surface. Rock art is a global phenomenon, being found in many different regions of the world.
There are various forms of rock art. These include pictographs, which were painted or drawn onto the panel, which were carved or engraved onto the panel, earth figures such as earthforms and geoglyphs; some archaeologists consider pits and grooves in the rock, known as cups, rings or cupules, as a form of rock art. Although there are exceptions, the majority of rock art whose creation was ethnographically recorded had been produced during rituals; as such, the study of rock art is a component of the archaeology of religion. Rock art serves multiple purposes in the contemporary world. In several regions, it remains spiritually important to indigenous peoples, who view it as a significant component of their cultural patrimony, it serves as an important source of cultural tourism, hence as economic revenue in certain parts of the world. As such, images taken from cave art have appeared on memorabilia and other artefacts sold as a part of the tourist industry. Pictographs are drawings that have been placed onto the rock face.
Such artworks have been made with mineral earths and other natural compounds found across much of the world. The predominantly used colours are red and white. Red paint is attained through the use of ground ochre, while black paint is composed of charcoal, or sometimes from minerals such as manganese. White paint is created from natural chalk, kaolinite clay or diatomaceous earth. Once the pigments had been obtained, they would be ground and mixed with a liquid, such as water, urine, or egg yolk, applied to the stone as paint using a brush, fingers, or a stamp. Alternately, the pigment could have been applied on dry, such as with a stick of charcoal. In some societies, the paint itself has religious meaning. One unusual form of pictograph, found in many, although not all rock-art producing cultures, is the hand print. There are three forms of this; the s
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