May2014

MOUNTAIN AND HIGH-ALTITUDE ARCHAEOLOGYalpine mountains. We have spent decades mapping thosehunting facilities and recording the hunting losses.These alpine hunters would seem to be “travelers” (in thesense of Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982), meaning that theyfocused on a relatively narrow diet breadth with a high averageforaging return from individual investments. Relying onrare resources with high caloric returns and low encounterrates, they paid high search costs but enjoyed low handlingcosts. These band-like polities likely lived in centralized villages,surrounded by a number of task-specific logistic sites(McGuire and Hildebrandt 2005).Bighorn hunters of the central Great Basin engineered anumber of exclusive Man Caves, and Gatecliff Shelter wasone of these, located halfway up Mill Canyon (at 2,315 m),about 15 miles north of Alta Toquima (Thomas 1983). Horizon16 at Gatecliff Shelter (4350–4100 B.C.) is the earliestdatable presence in the central Basin mountains, with nearbyTriple T Shelter being occupied about the same time. Severalof these middle Holocene occupations document thebeginning of a long-term pattern of sheep hunters visitingthe logistic camps to work the remote uplands of theToquima Range, especially the Mt. Jefferson Tablelands.Gatecliff Shelter (along with several other central Basin cavesand shelters) was engineered by bighorn hunters to suit theirhigh-mobility hunting lifestyle. These south-facing sheltersare huge lithic heat sinks, remaining fairly cool in the summertimeand holding heat in the wintertime. Logistichunters crafted their personal space in repetitious andredundant ways, building fire hearths in exactly the sameplaces, sleeping in the same spaces, reworking their gearwhile sitting in the same spots through time. They carriedfield-dressed bighorn into Gatecliff Shelter, where they lightenedthe load by discarding waste and drying the meat fortransport. They painted the walls with red, yellow, black, andwhite pictographs. Eventually, the hunters picked throughtheir gear— carrying some and caching other things forlater— and then headed home. This logistic pattern persistedthroughout the post-middle Holocene Transition and intothe Neoglacial periods. The rock blinds and hunting lossesare scattered across the highest reaches of the ToquimaRange and mountaintops across the central Great Basin.For millennia, Gatecliff Shelter functioned as a camp forlogistic hunters pursuing bighorn in the alpine ToquimaRange catchment. Very similar logistic hunting patterns areevident at a number of caves and rockshelters throughoutthe central Great Basin— the Man Caves— including JamesCreek Shelter, Bronco Charlie Cave, Ruby Cave, Deer CreekFigure 2. Deborah Mayer O’Brien inside one of the numerous beehivehunting blinds at the South Summit of Mt. Jefferson (located about3600 m, roughly 3 km southeast of Alta Toquima).Cave, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, South Fork Shelterand Pie Creek Shelter.I use the term “man cave” to describe the apparently all-malehunting camps that proliferated during a time of intensivebighorn hunting. While female foragers certainly traveledextensively and sometimes hunted in the ethnographic GreatBasin, this family band structure did develop until muchlater in the Intermountain West. Ironically, Julian Stewardbegan his Great Basin research with deeply held convictionsabout the roles of men who hunted and fed their families,and he spent considerable time seeking male-centeredhordes and bands, the so-called patrilineal band. But knowledgeablePaiute and Shoshone elders agreed— eveninsisted— that men’s hunting never provided nearly as muchfood as women’s gathering of nuts, seeds, and roots. Thiswas bad news for Steward’s patrilineal band concept, forcinghim to conclude that the fundamental sociopolitical group inthe nineteenth-century Great Basin must have been the familyband (Thomas 2014a). Ironically, the Man Caves of centralNevada do indeed demonstrate the importance of all-malehunting parties— Steward was just a couple of millennia toolate to see these band-like polities in operation.About 800–650 B.C., severe post-Neoglacial drought conditionsgripped the central mountains. Gatecliff Shelter wasabandoned, as were virtually all of the Man Caves of centralGreat Basin. Logistic bighorn hunting— a pattern that hadpersisted for nearly 4000 years— had effectively died out byabout 200 B.C. The radiocarbon record further demonstratesthat with the onset of the post-Neoglacial drought, much of34 The SAA Archaeological Record • March 2014