Clothing, Housing, and Transportation
The climate of the Great Basin tended between extremes of heat and driness and freezing cold; most of the Basin's annual precipitation was in the winter in the form of snow. Clothing would seem to be mandatory for personal protection; however, the Basin's resources did not provide well for clothing. Basin people possessed neither wool nor cotton, like their relatives in the Southwest; nor did they possess large numbers of quality animal pelts like their neighbors in the Plains. As a consequence, the people of the Great Basin went about naked through much of the year. A child might wear only a necklace of some kind; adults might add earrings or something tied in the hair. Adult women might wear a very brief skirt made from woven grasses or finely cut bark of sagebrush. Adult men could wear a belt or "g-string". Women might wear a simple basketry hat. Individuals might be lucky enough to have made simple moccasins from animal skins or might have woven sandals from tules or cattails. (Wheat, 1-13)
This basic nudity did not change in winter but the need for warmth was met by adding a cape made from rabbit skins. The cape was tied around one's neck with cordage and it was usually long enough that it hung almost to the knees. At night the cape became both blanket and bed. It was perhaps the Great Basin's most significant technological invention. It was no mere blanket of sewn skins; in fact, it was a marvelously thick and warm garment with fir on both the inside and the outside. It was the product of weaving. Rabbit skins were first cleaned, cured, and dried. When enough skins were available, each skin was cut into a single long strip, about an inch wide, just as one might cut an orange peel into a single strip. When the rabbits skins were cut into strips, they were then twisted into what amounted to a thick "thread", fir side out, and woven into a fabric on a primitive loom. The product was very durable and must have been quite warm. (Wheat, 74-81
The most common housing throughout the Basin was a simple brush hut constructed with a willow framework and covered with tule, brush, or grass mats. A circular area of ground was cleared and about a dozen narrow holes were dug at equal distances in a circle. The basic framework was created by planting a dozen long willow branches in these holes, each perhaps ten to twelve feet in length. Next, more flexible willow branches were tied around the circle of willows about two feet up from the ground, pulling them inward slightly to make a firm foundation. At about the four foot level, more flexible willows were tied around the circle, this time in a narrow circle, pulling the whole framework toward a dome shape. And finally, the dome is finished by tying the willows into a narrow smoke hole at the top. With the willow framework complete, the walls are created by lashing mats into place, beginning at the bottom and overlaying mats top-over-bottom, proceeding to the top of the dome. These mats could be woven from tules or grass. An area of the side facing the east was left open as a doorway, though this might be covered by a removable mat door. The hut was usually stabilized against the wind by piling rocks all the way around the base; indeed, rock circles are a tell tale sign to archaeologists of the Great Basin. (Wheat, pp. 103-111) This typical tule hut is on exhibition at the Paiute-Shoshone Cultural Center in Bishop, CA.
Among the Washoe and in other areas where there was a supply of larger timbers, a more substantial winter house was constructed. This was semi-subterranean. The ground was cleared and then it was excavated to a depth of several feet. A foundation framework was created by planting timbers and lashing them together. Diverse patterns were possible, depending on what was available. It might be a simple lean-to or it could be a more complex setup of posts and rafters. When the framework was established, the wall-frames were built by lashing on smaller timbers and branches. The whole structure moved from thick wood to flexible branches and, finally, to brush and grass. At last, with the wooden structure completed, layers of earth were thrown over the whole construction, creating a very weather-tight and wind-proof dwelling. These usually included a doorway in the side, perhaps with a tunneled entry, and a rectangular smoke hole in the roof. Such dwellings were built in the region where the Washoe wintered and were re-occupied season-after-season. Thus, they were the only permanent houses known to the Great Basin. (d'Azevedo, "Washoe", pp.??; Downs, pp. ??)
There was always a need for shelter, of course, and the Basin people built a wide variety of wind breaks and shelters in the spring and summer encampments. Wind breaks were often simply areas between small trees or larger brush. The area was cleared and brush was collected and woven between the ring of trees to a height of a few feet. A simple ramada could be built for shade, using branches woven between an existing tree cover and covering the framework with smaller branches, brush, and tule or grass mats. An individual hunter, caught in bad weather or seeking shelter from sun, might simply pull sagebrush up to a height where he could crawl underneath and rest. (Wheat, pp. 1-16)
Transportation in the Great Basin was universally by foot. The only exception to this was in marsh and lake country where a canoe was used for both fishing and waterfowl hunting. The canoe was made from tules and cattails. The tules were cut and gathered in long bundles. When enough tules had been assembled, cattails were used to tie the bundles into long tubular floats, tying them tightly at the ends. Ultimately, two or three of these floats were lashed together to make a firm foundation, and several smaller tubes could be lashed on top to create an interior area. The finished canoe was double ended and could be poled or paddled through the water. While it was good support in the water when the tules were fresh, this traditional tule boat rotted out in the winter and had to be replaced each season. (Wheat, 40-47)
Hunting, Fishing, and Agriculture
We can suppose that the entire region of the Southwest, Southern California, and the Great Basin was once essentially homogeneous --- more-or-less uniform in environment and in cultural lifeways. Southern California eventually defined itself in several different and unique adaptations to the specific environments found there. These adaptations offered a sedentary existence; and Southern Californians departed from the classic archaic lifeway. Meanwhile, what we recognize, today, as the Southwest acquired agriculture from Mexico and Central America and moved into a very different form of sedentary existence. In many respects, then, what we know as the Great Basin is the residue of this large area that remains an essentially archaic hunter-gatherer culture. If we discount the exceptional and short-lived Fremont Culture, these were not agriculturalists.
Hunting was universal throughout the Basin, though its relative importance varied depending upon the richness of other resources. Use of the bow and arrow began at some time between 2000 and 3000 years ago; evidence is scanty. What does seem clear is that hunters continued to use the atlatl along with the bow and arrow; and in some regions the atlatl was never completely retired. Bows were made from a sturdy straight-grained wood. Juniper was a common source in the Basin. Occasionally, a thick strip of wood was removed from the side of a living juniper tree; this was then carved into the tapered shape of a bow. Men of the Great Basin used either simple bows or the so-called sinew-backed self bow. The former, lighter in construction, was used for small game; the latter was used for large game animals. The sinew-backed bow was made with layers of deer sinew applied to the back of the bow, its whole length, so that, when dried, the bow had much greater total strength.
Arrows were made from a straight branch or shaft of some plant, such as willow or cane. The arrow shaft often required straightening and a stone with u-shaped grooves was used for this purpose. The stone was heated and then the arrow shaft was rubbed inside the groove until the combination of heat and pressure made it conform to a more-or-less straight line. More important than the basic straightness of the shaft, however, was the feathering at the tail of the arrow. Split hawk, owl, or eagle feathers were lashed to the shaft with sinew in a slightly angular pattern that produced rotation in flight. It was the arrow's rotation that caused it to fly true and not to tumble.
The head of the arrow was prepared in various ways depending on the game that was intended. An arrow might be a simple shaft or a compound shaft. In the latter case, the main shaft ended with a hollow socket and a hard-wood fore-shaft was fitted into this. (A similar design had already been used on the atlatl.) For small game, the simple shaft or the hard-wood fore-shaft would be sharpened and fire-hardened. For larger game, a projectile point would be attached. Usually this was done by carving a v-shaped notch in the end of the shaft, mounting the point in the notch, and firmly wrapping the point and shaft with sinew. When the sinew dried, the point was fixed to the shaft so fast that it would break sooner than it would come loose. The size of the point was determined, again, by the size of the game being sought. Bird points might be less than one-half of one inch, while points fitted for larger animals might be substantially larger.
While meat could be roasted on the fire or boiled, when fresh, the majority of meat was preserved for later use. The animal was gutted and skinned. After that, the animal was butchered and the meat was cut off in strips. The strips were then dried in the sun on a wooden rack, producing a jerky-like product that could be retained for a period of time. When ready to utilize dried meat, it could be reconstituted and boiled or it could be ground into a powder and mixed with seed- or nut-flour and heated into a high-protein mush.
Not all hunting was done with the bow and arrow. Traps of diverse kinds were laid along animal paths or near feeding grounds or watering spots. Some game, like rabbits, antelope, and waterfowl, were usually hunted communally. In this case, corrals and nets were used. A corral could be created by piling up brush or by staking down nets in a circle, with a large open end. The rabbits or antelope were driven into the corral, beginning at some distance with many people moving together across the land. Controlling the shape of the driving wedge, the hunters eventually forced the game into smaller space and, hence, into the corral. Others, often women and children, who waited behind the brush or nets, then attacked the trapped game and clubbed them to death or dispatched them with knives. Waterfowl were hunted communally using the same principle except that the waterfowl were usually scared in shore by hunters approaching in tule canoes and were trapped in nets that had been planted (submerged) at the edges of ponds and were suddenly raised in the path of fleeing birds.
Those people of the Great Basin who lived near marshes or small lakes and were able to hunt waterfowl in any number constructed elaborate duck decoys to attract waterfowl and improve their chances. The decoys were made from tules, tied together and wrapped in a complex fashion to build the body shape of a duck. When the floatable tule body was ready, a duck was skinned, feathering and all, so that it could be wrapped around the tule form. The decoy produced was an excellent replica of a duck and would float perfectly in a small pond. (Wheat, 47-54)
Fishing was not universally available throughout the Great Basin and it was most common in those areas that neighbored large lakes. Fishing was especially good, at certain times of the season, when fish travelled out of these lakes and into the rivers or streams feeding them to spawn. At times like these, fish were an easy target and could be netted or trapped in baskets in great quantities. One can still witness amazing runs of kokanee (land-locked) salmon out of Lake Tahoe (Washoe territory) from September through November each year. Tahoe also provided runs of native trout. Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake, both residues of ancient Lahontan, exhibit several species peculiar to their origin --- a large black-spotted cutthroat trout and a bony sucker called a cui-ui. (Wheat, 60-61)
Unfortunately, Great Basin people treated fish just as they treated meat and had not developed any other technology for preservation. Thus, fish were gutted, split, and de-boned; the filets were hung over large wooden racks to dry in the sun. But sun-dried fish does not age as well as jerky-like sun dried meat. Basin people fortunate enough to catch large numbers of fish in annual spawning runs, like the Washoe, could probably have supplied themselves round-the-year, especially with pine nuts also available, had they developed the technology of smoking their fish as did people of the Northwest. (Downs, 12-16)
At other times of the year, fishing was more challenging. Individual fish were speared or trapped in streams or along the shoreline of a lake. A common harpoon used in the Basin was a compound construction and used a bone point. The basic harpoon was a long, sturdy willow shaft with a hollow openning at the bottom. A small hardwood foreshaft was fitted into this hollow opening, firm enough to keep it mounted but slippery enough to eject with the tug of a speared fish. The foreshaft was tied onto the willow shaft with about a foot length of cordage. At the head end of the foreshaft, a bone point (perhaps a sharpened fragment of a deer bone) was tied to the other end of the cordage and cemented onto the shaft with a heated mixture of pine pitch and charcoal. (Wheat, 64-68)
For trapping, a long wicker basket was used. (California Indian Basketry, http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/cilc/basket.html)This was constructed with a long tube which led into a holding basket through a funnel-shaped entrance. On the inside, the funnel protuded into the basket and was narrow. Once the fish had passed up stream into the basket, the path back through the funnel entry was unlikely. Wicker fish weirs were also constructed in larger streams, causing fish to pause on their way upstream so that they could be more easily harpooned.
Beyond hunting and fishing, Great Basin people utilized a wide variety of plant materials. There was little technology involved here with the exception, of course, of the very early development of grinding equipment. While grinding stones in California tended toward deep bowl shapes and stones in the Southwest were large flat metates for milling hard corn, grinding stones in the Great Basin were usually large and shallow, using a small stream rock as a mano or even a pestle.
The plant material that sustained Great Basin life, especially in the last two thousand years, was the pine nut and utilization of pine nuts required technological innovations. While nuts can easily be removed from fallen cones of the pinyon pine (pinus monophyllia), they are rarely good for human consumption by that time and the crop has been substantially reduced by insects and small mammals. The pine nut came to be a useful staple food because indigenous people of the Basin learned how to harvest the nut prior to the final ripening stage of the cone.
The technology for achieving a pine-nut harvest was messy and complex, and it was practiced communally. In fact, pine-nut harvest defined the great social time of the year, being the greatest gathering of the people in the concentrated areas of sacred lowland pinyon forest. People went to the forests in the early fall before the cones had fully ripened and dropped. They began with "first fruit" celebrations that confirmed the sacred significance of the food and established their respect for the forests. When harvest began, the men pulled cones from the trees using tools made from large willow branches equipped with a sturdy V-shaped hook at the end. Women and children piled the cones in burden baskets (usually large conical wicker baskets carried on one's back with a cordage band across the forehead). At this point, the cones were just at the point of opening and were usually full of pine pitch.
In camps surrounding the forest harvesting grounds, the pine cones were processed. This began by roasting the pine cones around hot coals, turning them often, to cause them to open up. Then, the cones could be beated lightly to cause the nuts to fall out. When a supply of nuts was available, these required further processing since the nuts were covered by a soft brown shell. Cracking this shell would be difficult and would injure the fruit inside.
The nuts were processed by placing them on a basketry tray with hot coals from the fire. Once introduced together, the whole mass was kept in constant motion, throwing them up and swirling the tray, until the shells were roasted to a hard, crisp dark brown. The coals were removed at this point and the nuts were poured onto a grinding stone where they were lightly pounded with a mano until all of the shells had cracked and falled free of the inner fruit. Cracked pine nuts are yellow-orange, translucent and soft. They can be eaten at this point and are delicious.
Far more pine nuts were harvested than could be eaten raw so they needed to be processed further. At this point, the nuts were returned to a winnowing tray and thrown repeatedly into the air to allow the cracked shells to be carried off by the wind. When the shells were all gone, hot coals were returned to the tray and the roasting process was repeated until the nuts were dry and hard, somewhat darker in color. At this point, the nuts could be stored in large basketry storage containers for later use.
Dried nuts could still be eaten without further processing but the usual procedure was to make a pine-nut flour by grinding them. They were returned to the grinding stone and the mano was used to pound them lightly until they were well fragmented. Grinding was achieved with small amounts quickly so that the fine flour could be pushed off the metate forward into a bowl or onto a tray. A soap-root brush might be used to move the pine-nut flour on the tray. When enough flour was available, it could be warmed in water to make a thick paste; then the paste could be reduced, by dilution, to make whatever consistency was desired. While pine-nut mush may not sound especially appealing, addition of berries, various leafy vegetables, and/or ground meat or fish made it a feast. (Wheat, 29-39)
Housekeeping and Utilities
Just as the man was mainly responsible for hunting and fishing, and the associated arts of manufacturing suitable equipment for these tasks, the woman was responsible for gathering plants and preparing food, as well as the manufacturing arts associated with these. While men manufactured projectile points, bows, arrow shafts, nets, etc., women manufactured baskets of all kinds, fiber clothing, mats, and pottery.
The consensus seems to be that basketry preceded pottery everywhere. This is borne out in several ways --- the fact that early pottery styles imitate basketry styles and the fact that early pottery frequently utilized a basketry base. (James, 17-20) Basketry was pervasive and basket types covered a large spectrum of uses --- child carriers, burden baskets, carrying baskets, storage baskets, water bottles, hats, cooking pots, eating bowls, seed beaters, winnowing baskets, parching trays, gambling trays, and various kinds of traps. A capable woman could make all of these, and this required gathering all of the diverse materials as these came into the appropriate season in different locations. For a discussion of basketry styles and construction techniques, click here.
The Great Basin is an interesting and rich area for basketry research largely because its arid climate has well preserved archaic materials. Thus, archaeologists have brought forward basketry specimens of all kinds and, occasionally, of great antiquity. (Adovasio, HNAI, 11) Aside from the fact that Basin people made and used basketry objects for all the purposes mentioned above, they also used all three of the main basketry techniques --- twining, coiling, and plain plaited (wicker). Outside of those areas where pottery developed, and in all areas before pottery, Basin people cooked in baskets, following the traditional method of heating the contents with hot rocks, stirred in order to prevent scorching of the basketry material.
Pottery making appeared in the Great Basin in three regions --- among the Anasazi along the southern-most side, pervasively in the Freemont Culture of central Utah, and among the Paiute and Washoe in the western region of the Basin. Anasazi and Freemont ceramics were coincident with their agricultural lifeways and led directly to the high quality pottery of the later pueblos. But the Paiute/Washoe pottery stands out as a separate invention --- distinctly utilitarian and non-ornamental.
Owens Valley Brown Ware, for instance, was made from locally quarried clay that was molded into strips and formed relatively crudely into pots as concentric coils. The clay coils were crudely compacted and smoothed. The pot was fired in a shallow pit lined with brush. Cooking pots were usually conical in shape; but large narrow-mouth pots were also made for storage. When cooking with a conical pot, the fire was simply built around the pot's base. Paiutes of Owens Valley in the early contact period could not remember ever cooking with baskets. Beyond cooking and storage pots, the next most important ceramic product was the water jug. This was a round bottom pot with a narrow mouth, and it often had some small handles to which a carrying strap could be attached. (Madsen, HNAI, 11)
Paiute/Washoe pottery was not brought to a smooth finish on the outside so there was little tendency to develop designs or decorations. The exterior surface was a dusty grey-brown, somewhat pitted. Occasionally, a very light reddish paint was used for very simple decoration. (Madsen, HNAI, 11)
The problem of binding things together has been ever present in the human experience. Great Basin people used various things as glues and worked plant fibers into cordage. Glues were made from pine pitch with various ingredients added (such as charcoal), but glues could also be made from various concoctions of animal parts --- brains, sinew, etc.
Important in cordage manufacture were Indian hemp (dogbain), tules, cattails, sagebrush bark, willow bark, yucca, and even human hair. Plant leaves or stalks were usually pounded in order to free up the fibrous materials inside; these fibers were then twisted in a variety of ways to produce cordage. Narrow strands of cordage could be processed further, by twisting, to produce heavier rope. In particular, Indian hemp was treated by first scraping off the reddish bark of newer shoots. The stalk was then split down the middle, separated, and the pithy inner core removed. The middle part of the stalk was all fibrous material which was then separated into individual fibers by rubbing abrasion. Taking a few fibers at a time and holding them on his leg, a man would stroke the fibers out-and-back swiftly in order to twist them into fine cordage. Still working swiftly, new fibers were added into the twisting process, toward the end, in order to continue into a longer length of cord. The process continued indefinitely, and the cordage produced was usually wound around a stick for storage. (Wheat, 55-59)
