Basketmakers = Early Fremont?

(Had to make my own post so I could use the colors as emphasis!)

What essentially defines the Basketmakers is time, space, and some material culture. The material culture part generally includes pithouses (though some above ground structures were also used), atlatl use, use and probably reliance on corn, storage features (including rock shelters, dry caves, slablined cists, and bellshaped pits) no ceramics, and all this taking place around a couple hundred years BC to 400 or 500 AD. Does that sound familiar to anyone? What keeps the early Fremont from being Basketmaker? Location. Early Fremont really look a lot like Basketmaker groups. Rich thinks that early Fremonters ARE Basketmakers who in micro migrations expanded up into the Northern Colorado Plateau and Great Basin where they passed on some traits to the indigenious rabbit chasers before being culturally swallowed up. The Steinaker Gap report lays out Rich’s basic argument:

“There is another option seldom considered: small-scale migration of farmers. In this scenario, Basketmaker II nuclear or extended family groups, experienced in maize agriculture, would have spread northward from the more populous regions of northern Arizona, seeking the best arable land (Talbot 1995b). Such groups would have been minority populations in a sea of hunter-gatherers. Enculturation in these settings very likely was reciprocal, with the immigrant farmers sharing knowledge of agriculture and associated technologies, knowledge that ultimately led to widespread adaptive shifts, but with the people themselves inevitable being swallowed up in the local, larger gene pool.”

He goes on to discuss this more, but that’s the main idea. Although I’ve never talked to Janetski about this specifically, generally I don’t think he buys it. He feels that Basketmaker traits diffused slowly into the Fremont region, not through migration, whether large or micro. Although he does think that early Fremont are very similar to Basketmakers. He says:

“these data suggest that indigenous peoples in the central Utah region adopted and adapted new ideas from surrounding areas, both north and south, and gradually, rather than dramatically, shifted to a Formative strategy.”

And….

“These data also suggest that a Basketmaker II-like strategy was present well to the north of the traditional Anasazi area and preceded the better known Formative (Fremont) adaptation in this region”

Good reading on this includes
Talbot, Richard K., and Lane D. Richens
1996 Steinaker Gap: An Early Fremont Farmstead. Museum of Peoples and Cultures Occasional Papers No. 2. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

2004 Fremont Farming and Mobility on the Northern Colorado Plateau: The Steinaker Lake Project. Museum of Peoples and Cultures Occasional Papers No. 10. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Janetski, Joel C.
1993 The Archaic to Formative Transition North of the Anasazi: A Basketmaker Perspective. In ????(not sure, I’ll find out tonight)

So what’s it all mean? I think that obviously PreFremont or Early Fremont (200 B.C.- 500 A.D.) folks were heavily influenced by Southwesterners. I don’t think that early Fremont and Basketmaker were the same people in the sense of a distinct cultural group, like Americans or Frenchies. Instead they were small groups who shared similar cultural traits, just like Americans and Frenchies live in above ground houses, have a industrialized society, ect. Basketmakers and Early Fremont shared much in subsistence, architecture, and other things, but I don't think archaeologically they should be counted as the same group. In part because early Fremont seems to have been a little later and because they obviously followed different paths in the end. But right now the number of early Fremont sites is very low, so as the database increases this may clear things up considerably. That’s my general view of it all. I think they were very similar, but should be seen and discussed as different groups. Read Rich’s and Janetski’s reports and articles, cause they make their arguments much more clear than I do.