Fremont culture
The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a
Location
Name
The name "Fremont" was first applied to an archaeological assemblage of tools, art, architecture, and pottery by Noel Morss in his 1931 book, The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah.[3]
In 1776, Fray Escalante of the Domínguez–Escalante expedition referred to them as "Tihuas" or "Tehuas", by means of ethnographic analogy to contemporary Tiwa Puebloans, writing that the Colorado Plateau was "The land by way of which the Tihuas, Tehuas and the other Indians transmigrated to this kingdom; which is clearly shown by the ruins of the pueblos I have seen in it, whose form was the same that they afterwards gave to theirs in New Mexico; and the fragments of clay and pottery which I also saw in the said country are much like that which the said Tehuas make today."[4]
John Steward, writing in his journal on August 4, 1871 during the Colorado River Exploring Expedition, reported having found two graves and speculated that, "They may be those of the
Modern scholarship has suggested that it may be more appropriate to refer to this assemblage as the "Fremont complex" rather than as a coherent cultural group, as the use of the generic label "The Fremont" implies the existence of a bounded, discrete entity which, "fails miserably in defining a people who [...] are not easily described or classified."[6]
People
Scholars do not agree that the Fremont culture represents a single, cohesive group with a common language, ancestry, or way of life, but several aspects of their material culture provides evidence for this concept. First, Fremont culture people
According to archaeologist Dean Snow,
Fremont people generally wore moccasins like their Great Basin ancestors rather than sandals like the Ancestral Puebloans. They were part-time farmers who lived in scattered semi-sedentary farmsteads and small villages, never entirely giving up traditional hunting and gathering for more risky full-time farming. They made pottery, built houses and food storage facilities, and raised corn, but overall they must have looked like poor cousins to the major traditions of the Greater Southwest, while at the same time seeming like aspiring copy-cats to the hunter-gatherers still living around them.[7]
Snow notes that Fremont culture declined due to changing climate conditions c. 950 CE. The culture moved to the then-marshy areas of northwestern Utah, which sustained them for about 400 years.[8]
Recent developments
The Range Creek Canyon site complex is unambiguously identified with the Fremont culture, and because of its astonishingly pristine state, brought an immense amount of archaeological insight to this hitherto obscure culture.
First explored in 2004, the Range Creek property was a major find:[9]
Pit houses dug halfway in the ground, their roofs caved in, dotted the valley floor and surrounding hills. Arrowheads, beads, ceramic shards and stone-tool remnants were strewn all over. Human bones poked out of rock overhangs, and hundreds of bizarre human figures with tapered limbs and odd projections emanating from their heads were chiseled on the cliff walls ... the pit houses were intact ... and granaries were stuffed with corncobs a thousand years old.
Research completed in 2006 indicated that the land included 1,000-year-old hamlets of the Fremont people "highly mobile hunters and farmers who lived mostly in Utah from around A.D. 200 to 1300 before disappearing..."[10]
According to Snow, the Fremont's eventual fate is unknown, but it is possible that they moved into Idaho, Nebraska and Kansas, and may have become part of the
See also
- Cañon Pintado, a Fremont culture site in Colorado
- List of dwellings of Pueblo peoples
- Nine Mile Canyon
- Rochester Rock Art Panel
References
- ^ Janetski and Talbot 2014 in Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest p. 118.
- ^ Kloor, Keith (March 2006). "Secrets of the Range Creek Ranch". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 27 May 2016.
- ^ "Fremont Culture". Natural History Museum of Utah. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-60781-226-5.
- ISBN 9780966528701.
- S2CID 53614688. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
- ISBN 978-0-13-615686-4.
- ISBN 978-0-13-615686-4.
- ^ Secrets of the Range Creek Ranch Archaeologists cheered when Waldo Wilcox's spread was deeded to the state of Utah, believing that it holds keys to a tribe that flourished - then vanished
- ^ Secrets of the Range Creek Ranch
- ISBN 978-0-13-615686-4.
- National Park Service
- CP-Lunha site
- Snow, Dean R. (2009). Archaeology of Native North America. Prentice Hall. pp. 269–270. ISBN 978-0-13-615686-4.
Further reading
- Traces of Fremont: Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah (2010). Text by Steven R. Simms, photographs by Francois Gohier. ISBN 978-1-60781-011-7
- Snow, Dean R. (2009). Archaeology of Native North America. Prentice Hall. pp. 269–270. ISBN 0-13-615686-X.
External links
- "Fremont culture, on season 15, episode 8". Scientific American Frontiers. Chedd-Angier Production Company. 2005. PBS. Archived from the original on 2006-01-01.