This fascinating study covers the area of Great Salt Lake and the much larger and earlier Lake Bonneville, a region that includes large parts of Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming. Lake Bonneville was roughly the size of Lake Michigan, and it reached its peak during the last Ice Age some 17,500 years ago; it covered more than 10 times the area of present day Great Salt Lake. Lake Bonneville shrank into Great Salt Lake and more or less stabilized in size around the time the first Natives appeared on its shores about 13,500 years ago and probably much earlier. This is the story of about 675 generations of Indigenous people, how they shaped the environment and changed over time.
Author Steven Simms is professor emeritus of anthropology at Utah State University and a leading scholar of the archaeology of the Great Basin. In the opening pages, Simms challenges three myths associated with the region—first, that Indigenous people were timeless, changeless children of Nature; second, that America was sparsely populated; and third, that Native Americans were too primitive and too few to have had a role in shaping the places where they lived. As the cultural and natural landscape evolved, the Native people changed as well, easily adapting to new challenges.
Taking a landscape approach, Simms implies the importance of place—a kind of geographic determinism—and how where you live shapes how you live. He traces changing environments, climates, and peoples as the desert landscape changed over time. Successive Native cultures adapted and often dominated this changing environment from the first settlers, Paleo-Indian hunter gatherers, and the Archaic Period where people began to live in seasonal settlements with primitive agriculture to the Fremont that introduced corn agriculture and the Utes and Shoshone who mastered horses to expand their universe.
This volume is well-written in understandable language for a general audience. It is lavishly illustrated with 81 maps, photos, and drawings. It is an indispensable addition to the literature of the Great Basin and the Great Salt Lake region. —Mark Michel
