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Hamilton College archaeology professors Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones will travel to Grass Valley, Nevada for seven weeks this summer, June 4 – July 17, 1999, to look for new buried sites. Bringing 21 of their undergraduate students with them, the husband-and-wife team's long-range objective is to study the archaeological record of Central Nevada, and to develop understandings of culture history and adaptation in this region.

"The Great Basin of North America has long been recognized as a good natural laboratory to study the ecology of human foragers," says Beck. "Over the past year, we've been gathering evidence -- getting maps and aerial photos and assembling documents on the geology and archaeology of the area. We know of several sites of this age in the valley but we don't know which of them, if any, preserve buried occupation deposits."

Grass Valley has had some archaeological study, mostly in the late 1960s, but that work primarily focused on the late prehistoric and early historic records of Shoshone occupation. The Hamilton project is concerned with a much earlier era, between 8,000-12,000 years ago.

"Our plans for the season center mainly on exploration," says Jones. "Almost always, sites of such great antiquity lie exposed on the surface. Even if we do not find buried sites, we can use the artifacts from surface sites to help us answer questions about the people who once traveled through and occasionally stopped in Grass Valley. Were they the same people who occupied the valleys we have studied further to the east, and did they practice the same patterns of land use in these two areas? We know very little of the early cultures in the intermountain region."

The Hamilton professors have been conducting their field school since 1986, and this summer's project will build on over a decade's experience and information. Over the years the Hamilton professors and their students have collected from about 20 different sites, amassing an artifact sample of approximately 10,000 specimens. The new phase of research will focus on human adaptation during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene era, 12,000 to 8,000 years ago.

Over the course of the program the group will undertake a number of projects using archaeological surveying and excavation techniques, including stratigraphic evaluation of deposits containing bones of extinct camel, toolstone surveying, and lithic quarry studies. Ultimately, the field school offers students the opportunity to practice archaeological methods that cannot be learned from a textbook or in a classroom.

Charlotte Beck has been a member of the Hamilton faculty since 1986, after receiving her doctorate from the University of Washington. She has been published extensively in journals including Anthropological Research and the Journal of Field Archaeology and specializes in the earliest human occupation of Western North America. Beck's research has been funded by Hamilton College and the National Science Foundation.

Also an alumnus of the University of Washington, George T. Jones has conducted fieldwork in Nevada's Great Basin snd San Juan Island, Washington. Interested in Great Basin prehistory, paleoindian cultures and evolutionary theory, Jones has received several Hamilton College research grants and coedited Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology for the Cambridge Press.

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