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Mountain Shoshone Technological Transitions across the Great Divide Laura L. Scheiber and Judson Byrd Finley Rapid replacement of indigenous material culture by Europeanmanufactured items is a long-held assumption about culture change in colonial contexts (Diamond 1997; Rodríguez-Alegría 2008). This model assumes that passive Indian peoples and cultures were immediately and ultimately absorbed into dominant European society. In this chapter, we present a case study from high-altitude hunter-gatherer campsites in the heart of the western frontier that challenges unidirectional assumptions of culture change. We hope to move beyond colonial dichotomies and an acculturation framework by emphasizing daily practice and identity construction in the context of diachronic technological change (Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998). The Rocky Mountains and northwestern Plains are steeped in historical and ethnographic traditions. This area is legendary for transformative events such as the expedition of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery in 1805 and 1806 and the Battle of the Little Bighorn seventy years later. It was the home of trappers, traders, and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Well-regarded early ethnographers such as Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, and Clark Wissler expanded our knowledge of Native American communities in the early 1900s. As invaluable as ethnohistory has been for the study of European colonialism in North America in general and the Plains more specifically , it has not often provided the long-term perspective afforded by archaeological research. Descriptions written by early travelers, traders, and even cultural anthropologists do not provide the kind of comparative perspectives that archaeology offers. Similarly, although archaeologists have increasingly contributed to scholarship on the worldwide 7 Mountain Shoshone Technological Transitions 129 impact of European expansion (Cusick 1998; Gosden 2004; Harrison and Williamson 2004; Lightfoot 1995; Silliman 2005a), archaeological studies that trace colonial encounters among mobile hunter-gatherer societies are rare (Scheiber and Finley 2010a; Schrire 1995). We propose new narratives to explore culture change and transformation through an emphasis on technological transitions, not just replacements, within broader social contexts. The Archaeology of the Western Frontier The American frontier is simultaneously a place, a time period, and a concept. Frontier expansion, westward migration, and pursuit of the American dream are concepts embedded with multiple layers and multiple meanings, and they have fascinated scholars from diverse disciplines for decades. As a place, the frontier is the shifting boundary at the edge of American civilization. As a period, it signifies a time between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. As an idea, it captures the spirit of American independence and embodies American freedom. Perhaps because the Plains historic frontier has been so well studied by researchers in other fields, archaeological contributions have until recently largely been ignored. Despite a few early studies of change and continuity (Deetz 1965; Krause 1972; Strong 1940), more widespread interest in studying contact and colonialism from an archaeological perspective is a relatively recent phenomenon on the northern Plains and is virtually absent in the mountains. Although scholars have investigated specific types of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeological sites such as rock-art sites (Keyser, Sundstrom, and Poerschat 2006; Mitchell 2004; Sundstrom 2002) and battlefields (Scott et al. 2000), material studies of hunter-gatherer daily life are absent. Rather, early culture contact on the western Plains and adjacent mountains is understood primarily through ethnohistory, eyewitness artwork, American trade goods recovered from burials, and bioarchaeological discussions of health and disease (Russell [1914] 1955; Scheiber 1994; Scheiber and Gill 1997). Diverse issues, from colonial theory to field logistics, contribute to under-theorization of colonialism and mobile hunter-gatherers in our 130 Scheiber and Finley research area. Neither ethnohistorians nor archaeologists have adequately contributed to a growing scholarship on long-term indigenous histories that span the precontact and postcontact periods. Ethnohistory lacks the needed time depth, leaving us peering into a clouded window that does not pre-date the early nineteenth century. Archaeologists are not necessarily trained to study the so-called contact period, which occupies a nebulous zone in regional chronologies, neither historic nor prehistoric, but rather consisting of theoretically under-informed descriptions of artifacts as index fossils and isolated finds (see Deagan 2004 for discussion of a similar situation in the Caribbean). We here assert a lens of materiality as a corrective insight into transformative practices as they occur across space and time. In our research of Mountain Shoshone landscapes in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, or GYE (see fig. 7.1), we explore different material signatures of mobile hunter-gatherers, with an emphasis on...

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