Idaho National Laboratory Cultural Resource Management Plan

Research Question—What are the dates associated with the manufacture and use of the crudely
made flat-bottomed vessels?
Crudely made flat-bottomed vessels (e.g., Intermountain Ware) seem to date after 1350 A.D. and
have been interpreted as a Shoshone incursion into the area. As with other crudely made vessels in areas
surrounding the upper Snake River Basin, the earlier well-made styles were replaced at that time by the
flatbottomed vessel. In the basin, however, the flat-bottomed vessels seem to show up in the
archaeological record at that time, but the well-made pottery continued to be made. The apparent
contemporaneousness after 1350 A.D. of both types makes the prehistory of the area unique and, if true,
is of critical importance to understanding the cultural history of the area.
Data Requirements: Any site with flat-bottomed vessels in a datable context or in the direct context
with other pottery types.
Problem Domain: Settlement and Subsistence
As presented thus far, if we can understand the distribution of archaeological sites (i.e., settlement)
relative to the distribution of necessary resources (i.e., subsistence), we can interpret much about the
lifeway of the people who left those sites behind. Our ability to accomplish this greatly depends on a
detailed understanding of the cultural chronology of the area so that sites of different time periods are not
lumped together in a single analysis.
The basic approach to analyzing the settlement and subsistence of a prehistoric time period has been
to correlate the presence or absence of sites with existing environmental zones. With some knowledge of
past climatic changes (see the environment problem domain), positive and negative correlations lead to
interpretations about the importance of specific resources to the regional inhabitants during that period.
To make reasonable interpretations, we must also assess the range of activities conducted at each recorded
site because environmental variables would be of different importance to different activities (e.g., a
fishing site would likely be in a different environmental and topographic location than an antelope
hunting blind). Therefore, a settlement and subsistence analysis has three independent variables: time
period, ecozone, and activity. The dependent variable in the analysis is the subsistence organization of the
groups inhabiting the region at that time. Once categories or scales for each variable have been defined,
the analysis becomes a simple statistical exercise; the principal problem, however, is to define meaningful
categories or scales for the variables. Research oriented toward defining two of the variables is addressed
under other problem domains: the time period under cultural chronology and the ecozone under
environment.
A variety of approaches to defining categories of site activities and subsistence organization have
been developed. One approach used during several large-scale research projects in the Great Basin seems
applicable to the upper Snake River Basin. This is because of the similar range of environments and
archaeological sites based on a model of hunter-gatherer foragers and collectors (Binford 1980). Binford’s
field research with the Nunamiut Eskimo and his interpretation of descriptions of other known
hunter-gatherer groups led him to argue that subsistence organization can be best interpreted by the
logistical complexity of resource acquisition. He proposed a continuum from simple to complex; the
simplest involves consumers consistently moving their residences to where food is immediately available,
with the most complex involving consumers only occasionally moving their residences but acquiring
resources often distant from the residence and transporting them back. The simple end of the continuum,
called foraging by Binford, is defined as follows:
[Foragers] typically do not store foods but gather foods daily. They go out gathering food on an
encounter basis and return to their residential bases each afternoon or evening…[T]here are apt to be
basically two types of spatial context for the discard or abandonment of artifactual remains. One is in the
residential base, which is…the hub of subsistence activities, the locus out of which foraging parties
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