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Promontory–Fremont Contact and Ethnogenesis in the Post-Formative Eastern Great Basin
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- Author / Creator
- Yanicki, Gabriel M.
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In the mid-13th century AD, small bands of people affiliated with the archaeologically known Promontory Culture and Fremont Complex resided in close geographic proximity on the west side of Promontory Point, Utah. The timing of this co-residence corresponds with significant changes that were occurring simultaneously elsewhere near the shores of the Great Salt Lake, associated with a brief efflorescence of communal bison hunting. Often interpreted as a cultural replacement, high-resolution archaeological data on the Fremont–Promontory transition in the eastern Great Basin have proven elusive but are captured at sites on Promontory Point. This study focuses on the intensive occupation by the bison-hunting Promontory people at Promontory Cave 1 and the previously unreported site of Chournos Springs, occupied by wetlands-foraging Fremont people. Impacts of culture contact are evident at both locales—Fremont influence on the Promontory and Promontory influence on the Fremont—that show efforts at social recruitment by the Promontory people and the perdurance of Fremont social identity, especially as evidenced by subsistence patterns and women’s craft production. While ancestral Southern Dene influences are clear in the record from Cave 1, interactions in the Great Salt Lake area do not appear to have been the Promontory people’s first contact with the Fremont. Ethnogenetic processes that can be linked to earlier association with Uinta Fremont in the northernmost Colorado Plateau preceded the interactions with Great Salt Lake Fremont seen on Promontory Point. Both the Uinta and Great Salt Lake Fremont are likely progenitor populations of the modern-day Kiowa, possibly prior to their divergence from other Tanoan-language speakers (i.e., Proto-Kiowa-Tanoans). Thus, though the Promontory archaeological record is informative of at least two stages in the differentiation of Southern Dene identities west of the Rocky Mountains, it is equally evident that culture-historical developments in the Late Prehistoric Great Basin, a period known as the Promontory Phase, cannot be construed as a purely Proto-Southern Dene phenomenon. Contact and alliances between Southern Dene and Kiowa-Tanoan ancestors may be imperative in understanding the emergence of diverse and widespread Diné and Ndee groups across the Southwest and Plains by the mid-16th century, the implied bonds of kinship that facilitated Kiowa social access across the Continental Divide as communal bison hunters, and the prehistoric origins of the longstanding association between the Kiowa and the Kiowa Apache.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.