Environment.

Trapped between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin is an arid expanse of terrain that includes present-day Nevada, Utah, western California, and southern Oregon. Temperatures fluctuate wildly. The summers are brutally hot while the winters can be bitterly cold. The area's inhabitants depended primarily on the Archaic hunting-and-gathering strategy. Rabbits, antelope, snakes, pine nuts, roots, berries, and other wild plants contributed the bulk of the people's diet. The scarcity of food inhibited the development of large, settled communities, and band structures persisted here well into the contact period.

Early Prehistory: 8000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.

Clovis people moved into the Great Basin more than ten thousand years ago, and their culture transformed into what archaeologists call the Western Archaic tradition. Between 8000 B.C. and contact with Europeans in the early nineteenth century, the Archaic culture...