ABSTRACT
The first extended effort, in the mid-twentieth century, to understand the archaeology of the Interior West took as its model the ethnographers’ picture of people roaming the sagebrush, eating roasted grasshoppers and grass seeds, scattered like their resources. Because most streams in the Interior West flow into lakes within the region, rather than into an ocean, it has been given the term Great Basin. The warming climate trend that began in the Terminal Pleistocene and reached a climax in the fourth and third millennia bce brought considerable aridity to the Great Basin, depleting resources needed by humans. North of the Great Basin are the uplands through which major rivers flow to the Pacific: the Columbia, the Snake, and the Fraser. Somewhere in the Great Basin, Apacheans, forebears of the Navajo and Apache, may have traveled. These Athabascan-speaking peoples migrated from northwest Canada to the American Southwest about a thousand years ago, no doubt taking several centuries to complete the move.
