From 1768–1776, Francisco Garcés, O.F.M., undertook a series of “entradas” (explorations) into Native nations and territories throughout modern Arizona, Sonora, and the Californias. Mostly alone in Native company, he was guided from one settlement to the next, learning interrelationships, languages, and aspects of traditional knowledge. Much of Garcés’s work is unavailable in translation, and extant publications (whether in transcription, translation, or both) are largely uninformed by the ethnographic record. Focusing on two little-known accounts, this volume seeks to interpret Garcés’s ethnography in its pertinent historical contexts. The main document is a preliminary report (the “Noticias del Diario”) of his 1775–1776 entrada, compiled four months before the final diary. This report built upon his entradas of 1768–1774, summarized in another report (the “Noticias Sacadas”) immediately prior to the final expedition. Both reports, with related letters and accounts, are presented here in their original Spanish, interleaved with English translations. Ethnographic and historical annotations are interspersed, while Garcés’s routes are charted with historical and new maps. An appendix untangles documentary chronology (including via watermarks), and a second reconstructs his routes in detail. In all, Garcés visited more than 30 nations of three distinct language families. His observations at Hopi, among River Yumans, Takic, Yokuts, Numic, and Pai peoples, give often unique glimpses of Indigenous American societies at this period. Garcés was an ethnographer avant la lettre, learning directly from Native interlocutors. His work represents the dialogical precipitate and indirect transmission of some Native knowledge and practices within a large region of southwestern North America.

This second volume of the Alta Toquima trilogy situates Monitor Valley archaeology within the Central Mountains Archaic, introduced here as a taxonomic equivalent to the better-known Lovelock culture, Fremont complex, and the Virgin Branch of Ancestral Puebloans. This analysis integrates Monitor Valley into the broader Intermountain West using seven multiscalar time slices that address paleoclimatic and cultural change from the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene (pre-7000 cal b.c.) through the Little Ice Age (cal a.d. 1350–1800). This overview establishes that the loglinear relationships between two independent cultural proxies (nearly 5000 cultural radiocarbon dates and more than 47,000 time-sensitive projectile points) are highly correlated (r = 0.988) and relevant for explicating region-by-region demographic change. We hypothesize that the Intermountain West achieved (or exceeded) exponential growth throughout more than 90% of the 13 millennia spanning Paleoindian colonization through Euro-American contact. During two notable exceptions—the Late Holocene Dry Period (850 cal b.c.–cal a.d. 100) and the late 13th-century drought—human population growth fell below exponential expectations. The Late Holocene Dry Period (LHDP) was a pivotal climatic event that varied in geographic range, duration, and intensity. The 42°–40° N dipole hypothesis holds that persistent La Niña-like climatic conditions resulted in an anomalously moist northern Great Basin and exceptionally arid southwestern Great Basin, separated by an undulating dipole transition between 42° and 40° north latitude. Human demography plummeted below exponential expectations as foragers abandoned almost all settlements south of the 42°–40° N dipole, marking an intensification that shifted away from “man caves” and logistical bighorn hunting to extended family bands who created the first alpine residences at Alta Toquima. The high-elevation settlements were occupied only during the driest of the short-term xeric-mesic cycles during (and after) the LHDP. In wetter times, the alpine houses were abandoned in favor of repurposed man caves and other subalpine base camps. These syncopated intensifications began a full millennium before the arrival of bow technology into the Central Mountains Archaic. The other exception to exponential growth was the tumultuous late 13th-century drought, when the Fremont complex dissolved after a dozen centuries of farming, the Lovelock culture disappeared, and the Virgin Branch of Ancestral Puebloans collapsed—all part of the far-reaching demographic decline in the American Southwest and elsewhere across interior North America. In the aftermath of these fundamental economic shifts, changing social landscapes, and human migrations, the Little Ice Age returned to exponential growth during the challenges and windfalls for Shoshonean communities of the Intermountain West. This volume proposes and tests multiple hypotheses addressing the deep natural and cultural histories of the Intermountain West. Resilience theory proves to be an important tool in unraveling relationships between abrupt climatic and behavioral adjustments, human paleogeography, piñon pine processing, multiple meanings of abandonment, adaptation to lacustrine and desert-mountain mosaics, and shifting landscapes of ritualized practice.

Despite their ubiquity, surface occurrences of obsidian artifacts at archaeological sites throughout western North America have traditionally been viewed as unworthy of serious attention because of the difficulty in dating them. In the past 40 years, the time sensitivity of certain Great Basin projectile point types has been established, which brings the importance of surface collections more center stage. With the coming of age and refinement of geochemical methods, obsidian artifacts from these surface sites can now be analyzed using nondestructive instrumental methods and matched to their geological eruptive origin on the basis of congruence in trace and rare earth element chemistry. Many of these surface assemblages in the Great Basin contain considerable numbers of obsidian projectile points that, when matched to their chemical source of origin, open up entirely new ways to investigate change and continuity in past land use and social relations. The present study was conducted in the lower Humboldt Valley of western Nevada, where large numbers of obsidian projectile points have been collected by professional archaeologists over the past century and housed in academic institutions and museums. In this study, more than 900 obsidian projectile points and bifaces were analyzed from 24 sites and localities within the lower Humboldt Valley using energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) to bring data to bear on the question of whether changes in obsidian source use occurred there over the past 5000 years (as determined by time-sensitive projectile points). Significant changes were identified in the direction and distance-to-source of arrow points vs. dart points, and in the source and direction of Humboldt series points and of Humboldt Basal-notched bifaces, which implicate directional shifts through time in social relations among peoples using—and during some periods living at sites in—the lower Humboldt Valley. These results provide independent data to evaluate current views about land use, artifact conveyance, social relations, and technological change in the western Great Basin and beyond.

The Central Mountains Archaic began with the arrival of foraging populations in the Intermountain West about 6000 years ago. This migration coincided with the "extremely dramatic" winter-wet event of 4350 cal b.c. and the arrival of piñon pine forests in the central Great Basin. Human foragers likely played a significant role in the rapid spread of piñon across the central and northeastern Great Basin. Logistic hunters exploited local bighorn populations, sometimes serviced by hunting camps (the "man caves" such as Gatecliff Shelter, Triple T Shelter, and several others) and they staged communal pronghorn drives at lower elevations. As climate cooled and became more moist, logistic bighorn hunting gradually shifted downslope, then apparently faded away about 1000 cal b.c. Communal pronghorn driving persisted into the historic era in the central Great Basin. This volume, the first in the Alta Toquima trilogy, describes and analyzes more than 100 alpine hunting features on the Mt. Jefferson tablelands. High-elevation, logistical bighorn hunting virtually disappeared across the central Great Basin with the onset of the Late Holocene Dry Period (about 750-850 cal b.c.), giving way to an alpine residential pattern at Alta Toquima (26NY920) and elsewhere on Mt. Jefferson. Situated at almost exactly 11,000 ft (3352 m) above sea level, Alta Toquima was sited on the south summit of Mt. Jefferson (the third-highest spot in the state of Nevada), where at least 31 residential stone structures were emplaced along this steep, east-facing slope. When first recorded in 1978, Alta Toquima was the highest American Indian village site known in the Northern Hemisphere. This volume discusses the material culture, plant macrofossils, vertebrate fauna, and radiocarbon dating for Alta Toquima. Bayesian analysis of 95 14C dates documents an initial occupation of Alta Toquima at 1370-790 cal b.c., with the sporadic settlements persisting until immediately before European contact. These alpine residences are the most dramatic examples of the intensified provisioning strategies that began in the Central Mountains Archaic about 3000 years ago, broadening the diet breadth to include plant and animal resources previously considered too costly. The oldest summertime residence at Alta Toquima correlates with the onset of Late Holocene Dry Period (LHDP) aridity (~750 cal b.c.), and these houses were episodically occupied only during the driest intervals throughout the next 1500 dramatic years of abrupt climate change. During the intervening wetter stretches, Alta Toquima was abandoned in favor of subalpine basecamps. This sequenced intensification predated the arrival of bow technology in the central Great Basin by more than a millennium. Exactly the opposite sequencing took place a few miles to the north, when Gatecliff Shelter was abandoned during LHDP aridity--precisely when the first summertime settlements appeared at Alta Toquima. This pattern reversed again when lowland habitats became sufficiently well watered to again support summertime patches of seeds and geophytes (~150 cal b.c.-cal a.d. 100). Alta Toquima families responded by abandoning (temporarily) their alpine summertime camps to repurpose former "man caves" like Gatecliff and Triple T shelters into family settlements. The Monitor Valley sequence documents several syncopated lowland-alpine, wet-dry reversals, reflecting an adaptive diversity that spanned more than two millennia. The drought terminating cal a.d. 1150 devastated much of the western Great Basin and American Southwest, but its impact was less severe in central Nevada. Although subalpine sites were again abandoned during the drought buildup that peaked in the mid-12th century, summertime occupation of Alta Toquima became more commonplace, although it increased notably during the ~cal a.d. 1200-1400 aridity and persisted throughout the Little Ice Age.

7 Introduction 9 Classification and inventory of Panoan languages and dialects 9 Ethnonyms and orthography 12 Former misconceptions about the Panoan family 17 On dialects and languages 19 Panoan internal classification and Panoan dispersal 21 Relations to other South American families 22 Panoan-Takanan relations 22 Other proposed genetic ties beyond the family 24 Contact with other Amazonian groups and Kechua speakers 24 History of Panoan linguistics 26 The Jesuits (1640s–1768) 26 The Franciscans (1657–1930s) 28 Foreign travelers of the 1800s 32 European philologists of the late 1800s 34 A new generation of list collectors and linguists (1900–1930s) 34 The Summer Institute of Linguistics (1940s–present) 37 University academics (1970s–present) 39 Priorities for future research 41 Typological overview 43 Phonology 43 Morphology 43 Syntax 44 Ethnolinguistic features 45 Linguistic taboos 45 In-law avoidance speech 45 Weeping kinship lexicon 45 Lingua francas and pidgins 46 Ceremonial languages 46 Gender-specific speech 46 Game synonymy and pet vocative terms 48 References 49 Appendix 1: Index of common denomination synonyms, variants, and homonyms 74

494 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 26 cm. Conference sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the St. Catherines Island Foundation.