Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

The Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology began publication in 1979, replacing The Journal of California Anthropology, and has now completed 14 volumes. With such a large selection of articles now available in the Journal, this index has been compiled in order to assist our readers in referencing material. It is organized as follows: Author Index, all-inclusive and arranged alphabetically (page 3); Title Index, arranged alphabetically, with review titles listed separately (page 23); Review Index, listed alphabetically by author of work reviewed (page 33); Review Index, listed alphabetically by title (page 40); and Colleagues Remembered, arranged alphabetically by name of person memorialized (page 46). It is hoped that this index will be a valuable tool for all readers of the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology.

Although Native American communities may lose their ancestral language or other aspects of their traditional culture, music seems to be more resistant to the continual onslaught of the dominant Euro-American culture. Even today, traditional music remains a vital part of Native American communities throughout the United States. In this article I examine one aspect of the musical traditions of the Western Mono, specifically the different types of songs, and their functions within Western Mono society. First, I give a short synopsis of aboriginal Mono culture and society. Next, I discuss what little data have been published dealing with Mono music in the ethnographic literature. And finally, I present the data that I have collected.

Residential architecture has traditionally been of special interest to archaeologists (Trigger 1967), and in recent studies of hunter and gatherer societies it has assumed new importance as an indicator of social complexity (Price and Brown 1985) and residential mobility (Ames 1991). A great deal of productive research has been conducted in southern Idaho in the last 15 years, resulting in the identification of 15 sites with house features and information on 29 separate structures. This paper describes the prehistoric houses built in southern Idaho, compares these with other residential structures in the Intermountain West, and identifies needed research to place these features in a broader interpretative framework. The geographic area of the study includes the Snake River Plain in southern Idaho, and the Boise, Payette, and Weiser river drainages in western Idaho (Fig. 1). For recent overviews of southern Idaho prehistory see Butler (1986), Holmer (1990), Meatte (1990), Titmus and Woods (1991), and Pavesic and Studebaker (1993).

The Shasta-Trinity National Forests curve around the northern and northwestern edges of the Sacramento Valley in northern California, including within their boundaries the southern Medicine Lake Highlands, the slopes of Mount Shasta, much of the steep topography of the Klamath Mountains, and the headwaters of both the Sacramento and Trinity rivers. The approximately 1,800 recorded prehistoric archaeological sites on the Forests encompass some 8,000 years of prehistory. Cultural materials from these sites have been organized into three or four patterns with the Borax Lake Pattern being the oldest (e.g., Hildebrandt and Hayes 1984; Sundahl 1992b). Although constituting the smallest proportion of cultural remains on the Forests, materials of the Borax Lake Pattern are well represented in the Squaw Creek drainage in Shasta County and in South Fork Mountain and at the Cox Bar Site (CA-TRI-1008), both in Trinity County (Fig. 1). A considerable amount of research, primarily sponsored by the Shasta- Trinity National Forests, has been conducted in these areas. This article describes and compares the Borax Lake Pattern assemblages from these areas and proposes the recognition of two aspects within the pattern.

This paper examines thunder, and its association with native Californian rain-making traditions. Although the discussion considers all of native California, it is focused primarily on the northern part of the state. Two related hypotheses are advanced herein. First, it is proposed that native Californian rain-makers accomplished their tasks by ritually creating one or more aspects of the storm (i.e., thunder, cloud, wind, or rain). Second, it is proposed that some pitted boulders represent percussive implements used by shamans to achieve altered states of consciousness, a condition necessitated by their rain-making activities. The ethnographic and archaeological data leading to these hypotheses suggest the "Western Rain-Making Process" described in this paper.

The data from the oral tradition appear to form a plausible line of evidence that Numic populations did move north and east from the southwestern Great Basin. The extant indications of direction of movements are quite consistent with the directions postulated by Lamb. Such population movements would likely have taken place fairly late in time for these indications to still be present in the oral tradition. There are very few oral tradition data to support either of the two competing hypotheses.

Few scholars have accepted the evidence presented so far for associations between humans and mammoths, but Orr described a number of other intriguing early sites that may place humans on Santa Rosa Island by the terminal Pleistocene. For several years, we have been studying these and other early Santa Rosa Island sites. We have yet to find evidence for a Pleistocene occupation of the island (Erlandson and Morris 1992), but several early Holocene sites offer evidence for the settlement of the island prior to 8,000 years ago (Erlandson 1992). One of these is an isolated human burial at CA-SRI-116, a large shell midden located near the mouth of Lobo Canyon on the northeast coast of the island (Fig. 1). In this paper, we report on a suite of radiocarbon dates for CA-SRI-116 and describe the available data on the stratigraphic context of the burial, its position, and its artifact associations.

In this paper, "Millingstone Horizon" is meant to refer to archaeological cultures (or sites or assemblages) where the dominant food processing technology is the mano and metate and whose ecological adaptation is thought to be very heavily dependent on plant foods.

Since more than a half dozen years ago, when catastrophic floodwaters scoured the western Nevada countryside and washed to light an unparalleled archaeological record of absolutely unexpected richness, the U.S.D.I. Fish and Wildlife Service has pursued an aggressive program of cultural resource management at Stillwater Marsh. Almost without precedent in the western states, F&WS has sponsored salvage operations, reconnaissance, survey, mapping, testing, excavations, modeling, and far-reaching research designs, all while engineering what must be one of the niftiest programmatic agreements that archaeologists and Native Americans ever have enjoyed. Now the protagonist of all that work has summarized part of the results in a lovely, nontechnical tract produced for a general audience, an exemplar of what agencies ought to do to repay the public footing the bill.