The Grass Valley Archaeological Project: Looking Back and Looking Forward

C. William Clewlow, Jr. and his Berkeley colleagues began their investigation of the Grass Valley region of central Nevada in 1969. Over the course of several seasons, powered by summer eld schools, their focus changed from prehistoric settlement patterns to the documentation and interpretation of nineteenth century Shoshone habitation sites. At the time, there were few models for the study of historic­period Native American sites. As Clewlow himself characterized it in 1978, the project became a series of “particularistic” studies that “will someday make a whole.” More than 30 years later, our studies and our understanding continue to evolve, as we begin to revisit the archived collections and eld notes from the Grass Valley Archaeological Project. A recently completed re­examination and analysis of the historic artifact assemblage from Pottery Hill (26LA1107), one of the Shoshone habitation sites, illustrates how new approaches, along with newly available comparative data, can be used to interpret the Grass Valley material

Direct Evidence for the Importance of Small Animals to Prehistoric Diets: A Review of Coprolite Studies

Researchers tend to underestimate or ignore the importance of small animals to the prehistoric diet due to the difficulty of separating cultural from noncultural faunal debris excavated from sites. Human coprolite analyses (dessicated human feces) indicate prehistoric dietary consumption of small animals. The large number of coprolites analyzed from North America reveals direct ingestion of small animals and indicates that small animal remains from sites indeed reflect human dietary patterns. The coprolites reveal that reptiles, birds, bats, and a large variety of rodents were an important and prevalent component of the prehistoric diet