130 G Gatecliff Shelter. Excavated by David Thomas, Gatecliff Shelter , in the Toquima Mountains of central Nevada, is a deeply stratified archaeological site found at the elevation of 2,139 meters within the pinyon-juniper range just east of Austin in Monitor Valley. This important site is said to contain “five discrete Middle Holocene archaeological ‘sites’ (stacked one on top of another); independent accumulations [are] remarkably similar,” according to Thomas (1983a, 527). Forty radiocarbon dates from fire hearths at Gatecliff Shelter establish its initial occupation at 7000 BP. An outgrowth of the Reese River Valley Project, the back story of Gatecliff Shelter is that its principal investigator sought a stratified site to test the so-called gastric or cultural ecological hypothesis famously (or infamously) promulgated by Julian Steward (1938) about Great Basin Indians following ethnographic fieldwork primarily among the Shoshone (Thomas 1973; Kerns 2003). As a result of his excavation of Gatecliff Shelter, David Thomas (1983a, 529) would report that its inhabitants primarily used this site until seven hundred years ago as a short-term “meat processing field plant,” that is, for the dismemberment of bighorn mountain sheep, whose meat they subsequently transported down from the mountains to encampments below. At the same time, because the seven-thousand-yearold cultural history of Gatecliff Shelter in so many ways mirrored Steward’s (1938) portrait of the culture of the Shoshone in the ethnographic present, Thomas argues that this famous anthropologist’s classic study can actually predict where archaeological sites in Reese River County could be found. Although Adovasio and Pedler (1994) would argue on the basis of their study of Gatecliff Shelter basketry—which contained all four types of twining still being done by the Shoshone at the time of Steward’s field investigations (see Basketry)—that they have proven the correctness of the “Lamb Hypothesis” regarding the relatively recent supposed migration into the Great Basin by these Central Numic speakers, and closely related others (see Numic Spread; Uto-Aztecan), Thomas, however, remains unconvinced that there was cultural continuity across those seven millennia linking the (archaeological) past with the (ethnographic) present (see D. Thomas 1994). In addition to Gatecliff Shelter’s thirty-six fire hearths, Thomas also reports finding incised stones and fifty-three painted motifs that include anthropomorphs and handprints (see Rock Art), shell beads imported at an early date from the Pacific Coast (see Trade), heavily used grinding stones, and cordage as well as basketry, the latter interpreted by him as “female extractive activities.” Yet another important finding from Gatecliff Shelter is its cache of four hundred projectile points. These, in turn, inspired the creation of what David Thomas (1981) calls the “Key-1 Monitor Valley classification,” a so-called long count for chronologically successive spears, atlatl dart points, and arrowheads based on measurements of their basal width, distant and proximal shoulder angles, and their variously placed side notches, which g e o r g e , w u z z i e a n d j i m m i e 131 effectively replaced the so-called short-count typology developed by Robert Heizer years earlier in the western Great Basin on the basis of his own excavations (see Archaic; Lovelock Cave). Despite his claim of a 74 percent accuracy rate in predicting where archaeological sites would be found in the Monitor Mountains based on Steward’s monograph, and conclusion that there were five thousand years of cultural continuity, the discoverer of Gatecliff Shelter has been termed a “true doubter” rather than a “true believer” “Basinist” with regard to the Lamb Hypothesis (Rhode and Madsen (1994, 213; see Numic Spread). George, Wuzzie (Northern Paiute, ca. 1879–1984) and Jimmie (Northern Paiute, ca. 1881–1969). “Wuzzie” (Small Animal) George was born on a non-Indian-owned ranch near the Stillwater Marsh in Nevada.1 A Toidokado (Tule-Eater) by band or place-named territorial affiliation (see Northern Paiute), she attended boarding school at the Stewart Institute in Carson City for one year. After employment in a Chinese restaurant in Fallon, Nevada, circa 1910, this Northern Paiute woman went to work on the Harmon Ranch, where she met and married Jimmie George, a Northern Paiute ranch hand. One day, after hunting deer, her husband reported a sharp pain in the exact same place (leg) he had previously shot and killed a deer. Interpreting this as heralding the onset of supernatural power (see Booha), Jimmie George immediately apprenticed himself to a Pyramid Lake Reservation shaman named Calico George. But after healing Jimmie...