Fremont culture
The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a pre-Columbian archaeological culture which received its name from the Fremont River in the U.S. state of Utah where the first Fremont sites were discovered. The Fremont River itself is named for John Charles Frémont, an American explorer. It inhabited sites in what is now Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from AD 1 to 1300 (2,000-700 years ago[1]). It was adjacent to, roughly contemporaneous with, but distinctly different from the Ancestral Pueblo peoples located to their south.
Location
Fremont Indian State Park in the Clear Creek Canyon area in south-central Utah contains the biggest Fremont culture site in Utah. A recent, major discovery of a new site at Range Creek, Utah, has drawn a great deal of interest because it has stayed undisturbed for centuries. Nearby Nine Mile Canyon has long been known for its large collection of Fremont rock art. Other sites are found in The San Rafael Swell, Capitol Reef National Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Zion National Park and Arches National Park.
People
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Scholars did not agree that the Fremont culture represents a single, cohesive group with a common language, ancestry, or lifeway, but several aspects of their material culture suggests they might be a single ethnic group. First, Fremont culture people foraged wild food sources and grew corn. The culture participated in a continuum of fairly reliable subsistence strategies that no doubt varied from place to place and time to time. This shows up in the archaeological record at most village sites and long term camps as a collection of butchered, cooked and then discarded bone from mostly deer and rabbits, charred corn cobs with the kernels removed, and wild edible plant remains. Other unifying characteristics include the manufacture of relatively expedient gray ware pottery and a signature style of basketry and rock art. Most of the Fremont lived in small single and extended family units comprising villages ranging from two to a dozen pithouse structures, with only a few having been occupied at any one time. Still, exceptions to this rule exist (partly why the Fremont have earned a reputation for being so hard to define), including an unusually large village in the Parowan Valley of southwestern Utah, the large and extensively excavated village of Five Finger Ridge at the above mentioned Fremont Indian State Park, and others, all appearing to be anomalous in that they were either occupied for a long period of time, were simultaneously occupied by a large number of people, 60 or more at any given moment, or both. The Fremont are sometimes thought to have begun as a splinter group of the Ancestral Pueblo people, although archaeologists do not agree on this theory.
Fremont people generally wore moccasins like their Great Basin ancestors rather than sandals like the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. They were part-time farmers who lived in scattered semi-sedentary farmsteads and small villages but never entirely gave 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 lagged behind the major traditions of the Greater Southwest, while at the same time copying hunter-gatherer techniques of their regional neighbors.[2]
The Fremont traditions and culture were halted beginning close to 950 CE in northeast Utah. This was due to climate change in the region that the Fremont people could not easily adapt to for sustenance or agricultural reasons. The culture was able to find a new home and continue to flourish in the northwestern part of Utah.[3]
Recent developments
The Range Creek Canyon site complex is unambiguously identified with the Fremont culture, and because of its astonishingly pristine state, promises to bring an immense amount of archaeological insight to this hitherto obscure culture.
Recent studies have shown that Fremont people are among the ancestors of several modern tribes of the West, but where they went and how they became incorporated into other traditions remains largely a matter of speculation. Some of the Fremont People could have relocated to south-central Idaho, while other might be among the ancestors of the later Dismal River culture of Nebraska and Kansas. Those that had lived previously in southern Utah might have relocated southward, joining already stressed Ancestral Pueblo communities there. Still other might have been absorbed by Numic-speaking bands of hunter-gatherers moving into the region from the southwest.[4]
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.
- ↑ Snow, Dean R. (2009). Archaeology of Native North America. Prentice Hall. pp. 269–270. ISBN 0-13-615686-X.
- ↑ Snow, Dean R. (2010). Archaeology of Native North America. Prentice Hall. p. 270. ISBN 0-13-615686-X.
- ↑ Snow, Dean R. (2009). Archaeology of Native North America. Prentice Hall. pp. 269–271. ISBN 0-13-615686-X.
- National Park Service
- CP-Lunha site
- Snow, Dean R. (2009). Archaeology of Native North America. Prentice Hall. pp. 269–270. ISBN 0-13-615686-X.
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
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