Summary

Description

This report describes a model that has been developed to predict the geographic structure of huntergatherer behavior in the Great Basin. The distribution of archaeological sites in the Stillwater Wildlife Management Area remains largely unknown, although chance exposure and limited archaeological survey suggests that prehistoric human use of the region was more intense than in most parts of the western Great Basin. As a prelude to further archaeological research, a model is developed herein to predict the probable geographic structure of huntergatherer behavior in the area, and its probable consequences for the development of an archaeological record. The model invokes environmental variability as a principal conditioner of foraging behavior, and attempts, through the application of assumptions from optimal foraging theory, to relate variation in the spatial and temporal distribution of subsistence resources in the Stillwater vicinity to a theoretically effective subsistence strategy. The model suggests that in most seasons of most years the marshlands of the study area offer a suite of diverse, highquality, often storable food resources, and that prehistoric foragers are likely to have concentrated their subsistence efforts there whenever hydrologic conditions supported a marsh ecosystem.