Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Great Basin Tools
5
The Great Basin
Introduction
The Great Basin is a place that was in many of our modern day states. These states combine Nevada, California, Oregon, Utah and Idaho. “It covers about 400,000,000 square miles” (Fagan 2019). The people that lived in The Great Basin, had to prepare for many different events, climate changes, hunting challenges, and much more. To aid them in facing challenges, they constantly created ways and tools to make facing challenges and doing tasks easier and more efficient. We will learn what tools were made and used, such as projectile points which helped with hunting. We will learn what some of the tools purposes were. We will learn what the tools are made from. We will also learn about which one was the most important in the Great Basin societies.
Grinding Stone
People of The Great Basin heavily depended on the seeds and vegetables that grew wildly such as, onions, wild rye, and pinion nuts. They used a tool called a grinding stone to process these plants to be able to use them and eat them (nps 2021). In this process of grinding seeds, there is one stone that a person holds in their hand, and then there is another one laying on the ground which is called a slab. After pounding on this slab for awhile it becomes smooth and creates some sort of holes on the slab (nvrockart 2015). After the seeds had been grinded, they were used for many different things.
Grinding Stone
Pictures
(Floridamuseum)
Baskets
Some may not think of a basket as a tool but it was very important for the people of The Great Basin. There were a lot of baskets that the women of the area would make. These baskets were woven from plant fibers that were gathered. They also sometimes used the hides from animals to make their baskets nicer. The ground stone tool was also very important in this sense because sometimes the plant fibers had to be processed first before being able to weave them into a basket (nvrockart 2015). The importance of baskets was so that people were able to carry more than they could with just their two hands if it was from seeds, to animal meat, etc. They could also trade these baskets for other tools. meat, seeds, food, and other items that may be wanted.
Picture
(American Indian)
Projectile Points
Projectile points
Among The Great Basin archaeologists have found a lot of evidence of a hunting device called a projectile point. "Projectile points offer a narrow insight to the past, but at least provide general framework for Great Basin cultures, and give us a broad impression of changes in subsistence practices and the extent of long distance contact over many centuries" (Fagan 2015). There were many different types of points that the people of the Great Basin created and used.
Corner-Notched Projectile Points
Some of the corner-notched projectile points are the gatecliff series which was from 3000 to 1300 BCE. The Elko Series which was from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. The Rosegate Series which was from 700 to 1300 CE. These corner-notched points were called this becaue there was notches on the bottom two corners of the point.
The side-notched points were not all notched on the sides like one would think they are. The Desert Series was one of the ones that were notched on the sides. This one dated after 1300 CE. The Unshouldered Projectile Point just have a base that curves inward. This one dates between 3400 and 3200 BCE. The Humboldt series is not notched. It dates from 3000 BCE to 700 CE. The Cottonwood Leaf-Shape and Triangular are also not notched. These date after 1300 CE
Side-Notched Projectile Points
These projectile points were very important to the people of The Great Basin. Before the points, hunting was very hard. The creation of the points made hunting a lot easier and provided the people with a lot more food and skins from the animals harvested. These points were tied onto large sticks and used as spears and later in time they were shot out of bows. Sometimes a lot of people would gather and drive the animals into a fence and they would all have these points and while the animals were all in one area, they could harvest more at a time. This was called communal hunting (Fagan 2015).
Importance of the Points
Most Important?
Most Important?
The most important tool that was used by the people of the Great Basin was most likely the projectile points. These were most likely the most important first of all because they created a new innovation of hunting that was quicker and more reliable. They provided the people with not only the meat from the animal to eat and stay healthy, they provided the skins from the animal. With these skins, the women could make baskets, blankets, cloths, and many other items. These blankets and jackets that could be made, keep the people warm in colder temperatures. Second, the projectile points that were left at the sites, leave archaeologists with a good idea of what happened in The Great Basin. They can radiocarbon date the tool and see how far back it dates. This can give them an idea of how long ago the land was civilized by these certian people and maybe suggest a way of living (Fagan 2015).
Bird decoys
Some may not think of bird decoys as tool, but it is a very imporant one in the world of bird hunting. The production of these decoys helped provide the people with many more birds to harvest. The decoys attracted the birds. These were made out of tule reed, some feathers that were found in caves. Sometimes they took real dead birds and took the skins with the feathers still attached and put it together (Fagan 2015).