Steven R. Simms’s First Peoples of the Great Salt Lake: A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming synthesizes the archaeology of the Intermountain West in new and exciting ways. Over 12 highly readable chapters, Simms takes a broad, landscape-based perspective, reconceptualizing how we think about archaeology in this region of the western United States. The book is accessible to a public audience, and it is a must-read for students and professional archaeologists.
Simms challenges two central themes that have been dominant in the history of archaeology in the region: (1) “the Pristine Myth, the cultural bias that Indigenous peoples were timeless, changeless children of Nature” (p. ix) and (2) “the notion that the story must be told as a sequence of discrete events among bounded peoples and cultures bumping into each other like billiard balls, yet staying true to their traditions as they wander the earth . . . [Simms calls] this the Biblical Model” (p. x). Remarkably, Simms does so without traditional culture-history terminology. Instead, Simms focuses on “the roles that different peoples played over time and across places” (p. x), for which he abandons traditional labels such as “Paleoindian,” “Archaic,” and “Protohistoric,” in favor of “explorers,” “pioneers,” and “settlers.”
Chapters 1 and 2 set the scene for the entire book, focusing on the relationship between the Great Salt Lake and the (former) Lake Bonneville Shoreline and G. K. Gilbert’s work to understand how these lakes relate to each other. The clarity of writing and choice of figures in these chapters are remarkably good in covering the vast range of temporal and spatial scales involved in the story.
Chapter 3, “Explorers in an Ecological Moment,” situates Lake Bonneville within the greater context of the peopling of the Americas during the Late Pleistocene. Simms adeptly summarizes the environmental conditions that opened opportunities for early occupation of the continent. After surveying the current evidence about the “explorers,” Simms highlights the lack of solid evidence for them in the Bonneville Basin.
Simms characterizes Clovis and Western Stemmed Traditions as “Pioneers and First Settlers,” the title for chapter 4. He focuses on the roles of caching, sharing of hunting and fishing technologies, long-distance raw-material distribution, and rock writing on boulders placed by the Bonneville Flood to illustrate the vital role played by social networks in the “settling in” that characterizes the “pioneers.” Importantly, he highlights continuity in the rock writing of the Melon Gravels of Idaho and Shoshone writing during the historic period. The millennial-scale continuity in Indigenous traditions has important implications for considerations of other themes later in the book, such as the “Numic spread hypothesis.” Illustrating the deep history of cultural landscapes and the continuity of social networks and traditions provides one of the most important contributions of the book.
Chapters 5 and 6 are two of the most succinct yet vivid descriptions of the “Archaic” period one can read. Simms focuses on the roles of root and pine-nut gathering/caching and communal hunting as evidence for land management and conservation throughout the Holocene. These chapters firmly lay to rest the naïve, colonialist assumptions behind the “Pristine Myth.”
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 focus on the introduction, increase, and “upheaval” of agriculture in the region. The maps are especially good in the way they illustrate this complexity, from the routes taken by Eastern Basketmakers across the northern Colorado Plateau to comparisons of Dene and Fremont migrations between the central Rocky Mountains and Colorado Plateau. Much is to be learned and appreciated in how Simms articulates the nuances of what are some of the most rapid and dramatic cultural changes in this part of the Intermountain West and how these changes shaped cultural diversity and landscapes throughout the region. As with his considerations of the “Pristine Myth” in preceding chapters, Simms challenges the classic “billiard ball” approach to interpretations of change in the archaeological record. Rather than seeing distinct groups slamming into each other, with one culture taking over others, Simms emphasizes the role of cultural change as one of selectively adopting certain new practices while maintaining more traditional practices.
The Biblical model of “billiard balls” comes into central focus in chapter 10, where Simms takes on the “Numic spread hypothesis.” This chapter summarizes new evidence from prayerstones and radiocarbon dating to highlight the possibility for much earlier manifestations of linguistic change. According to Simms, “The divergence of the Numic languages cannot be conceptualized as a single historical event or single population replacement” (p. 136).
Chapter 11 provides a unique and insightful summary of the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition that first brought Europeans into the region in 1776. Simms highlights interesting aspects of the Indigenous guides and their relative knowledge of the landscapes as they guided the Spaniards north onto the Colorado Plateau. The knowledge of these Indigenous guides offers clues about cultural transmission processes across the larger region before the arrival of Europeans. Simms uses radiocarbon data to illustrate the probable impacts of diseases brought by the Spanish.
Simms concludes his book with a “Denouement” (chapter 12) that revisits his main points, including his critiques of the “Pristine Myth” and the “Biblical Model.” As he puts it, “The story here resists the tendency toward categorical, binary thinking” (p. 162).
We need a book like this right now. It communicates our science clearly and in an engaging and interesting manner to the public who funds our work. It teaches us as professionals how to tell good stories from archaeological research. It moves us beyond outdated and overly simplistic approaches to archaeology that have often marginalized our discipline from the public we need to work with the most: the Indigenous peoples of the Intermountain West. This book, written by a leading scholar in the region, will hopefully set a new foundation to help us move in this direction. There are entire perspectives we are still waiting to hear that will undoubtedly advance our knowledge and enhance the way we manage the cultural landscapes of the Intermountain West.
