The Fremont Complex: a Behavioral Perspective Author(S): David B
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The Fremont Complex: A Behavioral Perspective Author(s): David B. Madsen and Steven R. Simms Source: Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 12, No. 3 (September 1998), pp. 255-336 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25801129 Accessed: 30-11-2015 18:11 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25801129?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of World Prehistory. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.123.24.42 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 18:11:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Journalof World Prehistory, Vol. 1%No. 3, 1998 The Fremont Complex: A Behavioral Perspective David B. Madsen13 and Steven R. Sirams2 The Fremont complex is composed of farmers and foragers who occupied the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin region of western North America from about 2100 to 500 years ago. These people included both immigrants and in digenes who shared some material culture and symbolic attributes, but also varied in ways not captured by definitions of the Fremont as a shared cultural tradition. The complex reflects a mosaic of behaviors including full-time farm ers,full-time foragers, part-time farmer/foragerswho seasonally switched modes of production, farmers who switched to full-time foraging and foragers who switchedto full-time farming. Farming defines the Fremont, but only in the sense that it altered the matrix in which both farmers and foragers lived, a matrix which provided a variety of behavioral options to people pursuing an array of adaptive strategies. The mix of symbiotic and competitive relationships among farmers and between farmers and foragers presents challenges to de use a tection in the archaeological record. Greater clarity resultsfrom of be havioral model which recognizes differing contexts of selection favoring one a case adaptive strategy over another. The Fremont is where the transition fromforaging to farming is followed by a millenniumof adaptivediversity and terminates with the abandonment of farming. As such, it serves as a potential comparison to other cases in the world during the early phases of the food producing transition. KEY WORDS: Great Basin; Colorado Plateau; farmer/foragers;agricultural transitions; behavioral perspective. Salt Lake Environmental Sciences, Utah Geological Survey, 1594 West North Temple, City, Utah 84114. of Social Work and Utah State department Sociology, Anthropology, University, Logan, Utah 84322. be 3To whom correspondence should addressed. 255 0892-7537/98/09(XW)255$15.00/0O 1998 Plenum PublishingCorporation This content downloaded from 129.123.24.42 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 18:11:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 256 Madsen and Simms INTRODUCTION In North America, the area west of the Rocky Mountains and east of the Sierra Nevada is a landscape of variation and diversity. High alpine meadows, stark salt flats, deep slickrock canyons, broad terminal river are marshes, numerous canyon streams, and dry pinyon/juniper forests all found within a few hundred kilometers of one another. Variation is found even within these environmental categories, with small spring-fed marshes dotted through the salt flats and willow and cottonwood dominated stream side vegetationmeandering throughthe pinyon/juniperwoodlands. These diverse landscapes are grouped into two primary geographic regions: the northern Colorado Plateau area along the western slope of the central Rocky Mountains and the basin and range topography of the Great Basin. The former consists primarily of a dissected mountain and plateau topog m. are raphy with elevations ranging from 1500 to 4000 Temperatures somewhat cooler, in general, than are those to the west in the Great Basin, and the annual average precipitation of lower elevation areas is generally somewhat higher (there are major exceptions). The mountain/valley topog raphyof theGreat Basin engenderswhat Currey (1991) refers to as a "hemi-arid" environment. That is, the Great Basin is half wet (the moun tains)and halfdry (thevalleys), with most of thevalley water derived from snow-fed runoff from the mountains. Both the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin share the marked seasonality characteristic of all midlatitude zones. The prehistoric societies of the northern Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin (Fig. 1) are also characterized by variation and diver sity,much like the landscape in which they were found. They are neither readilydefined nor easily encapsulatedwithin a singledescription. During the period when farming was part of the human repertoire in the region, some 500-2000 years ago, people were primarily settled farmers, growing maize, beans, and squash in small plots along streams at the base of moun tain ranges.Others were mobile foragers,living primarily on wild floraand fauna. Still others may have shifted settlement locations and group size, adjusting the mix of farming and foraging to changing circumstances. In some areas, the population was relatively dense and social groups showed of signs incipient stratification. In these locations, people experienced the intensification to process associated with farming the same degree as the Anasazi and other better-known farming cultures of the Southwest. In other areas, were only small, egalitarian, family groups found widely scattered across the were landscape,and not greatlyaffected by the feedback loops often associated with agricultural intensification. This content downloaded from 129.123.24.42 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 18:11:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Fremont Complex 257 0_300 KILOMETERS Fig. 1. General location of the maximum extent of the Fremont com plex in western North America. When the parameter of time is added to that of geographic space, our understanding of past behavior in the region can be even more obscured by common descriptive categories. For instance, during periods as brief as a human lifetime, the lives of some people were relatively constant, while others may have shifted from farming to foraging or various mixtures be tween the two. Consequently, the complexity of social organization was spa tially patchy, with varying degrees of residential cycling among settlements. The degree to which various groups were linked by consanguinity, by af finity,or by purely secular association is subject to continued investigation, but variation across space and at several scales of time seems well dem onstrated, and demographic fluiditywas a common characteristic of these farmer/foragers. If their rock art is a useful guide, these people may have had differing ideological views, as artistic representations vary in funda mental ways across the region. They may even have been linguistically di verse as well, much like the descendants of Southwestern Formative groups, such as the Hopi, Zuni, and eastern Pueblos, who exhibit linguistic diversity at the macro-level of language families. Currently, these scattered groups of foragers and farmers are called the "Fremont." Despite (or perhaps because of ) the difficulty in catego This content downloaded from 129.123.24.42 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 18:11:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 258 Madsen and Simms rizing them, the Fremont remain a fascinating topic of archaeological study, since they epitomize both the strengths and the weaknesses involved in investigating human behavior through prehistoric material remains. They are relatively recent, and many of their sites are so well preserved that we are as likely to know as much about them as about any prehistoric society. These sites are widely distributed and include an array of open structural sites, temporary camps, and cave/rockshelters. Literally thousands of sites have been documented and mapped and hundreds have been excavated and reported. Yet, unlike the Anasazi and any number of other nearby contemporary prehistoric groups, the Fremont have no known direct de scendants and historical analogy is unavailable to provide interpretive in sights. While this means that Fremont research does not suffer from "the tyranny of the ethnographic record" (Wobst, 1978), it also means there are no direct guides to understanding Fremont behavior. Everything we under stand about the Fremont must be inferred from material remains through the application of general theory. The Fremont thus provide an excellent case in which to employ ethnology, ethnoarchaeology, and general theory a in both critiquing and refining our construction of regional prehistory. The Fremont may be especially pertinent to the food producing tran sition in other cases in the world, such as the Levantine Natufian and early Neolithic in the Near East (e.g., Henry, 1995), Europe (e.g., Gregg, 1988), and elsewhere in the Americas (e.g., Gebauer and Price, 1992). The dual effectsof the adoption of horticultureby foragersand its spread by colo nizinghorticulturalists isexemplified by theFremont. It is increasinglyclear that the study of the food producing transition requires understanding the foraging populations that formed the context of the transition and persisted long after regions were predominantly agricultural in character. Further, the relationships between early horticulturalists and foragers are likely to involve connections which constrain and shape the decisions of both. As such, the spread of horticulture ismuch more than the spread of peoples a with farming way of life whose archaeological record dominates that of the typically unidentified foragers of ancient times.