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I "We are being milked of our richest ancient artifacts almost every day and we have to like it." i I - Charles N. Strevell, 1933 i When the Natural History Museum of Utah's (NHMU) new Rio Tinto Center opened in 2011, it was hardly the first such museum in the state. The USMA took another crucial step after incorporating: they succeeded "in securing the passage of a statute by the state legislature banning all exploration and excavations for, as well as prohibiting the removal of, prehistoric relics from the state without a permit from the State Parks Commissioners."[7] This law attempted to stop the outflow of Native American artifacts and dinosaur bones from the state.[8] The next step was to conduct an ambitious field survey of the state's archaeological and paleontological treasures. This was at a time when most states were far ahead of Utah in using museums to educate their state's citizenry about their cultural and paleontological resources. Maguire had been commissioned by the state that year to secure from southeastern Utah a collection of prehistoric artifacts for Utah's exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a task he enthusiastically carried out in every corner of the state. Steward even tried to negotiate a split in archaeological booty between state museums and eastern museums such as the Peabody.[14] It was past time, they believed, to provide Utah's relics with a home in the state's capital. [Extracted from the article]

The spread of agriculture is a major driver of social and environmental change throughout the Holocene, yet experimental and ethnographic data indicate that farming is less profitable than foraging, so why would individuals choose to adopt agriculture leading to its expansion? Ideal distribution models offer one framework to answer this question: Individuals should adopt less profitable subsistence strategies and occupy more marginal environments when local population density increases competition to the point where the suitability of the best strategies and habitats becomes equal to what can be gained in poorer strategies and habitats. Coupling radiocarbon-dated archaeological sites with a validated measure of agricultural suitability, we evaluate the emergence of farming in the Basin-Plateau region of North America. Our results show that farming first occurs in the more suitable Colorado Plateau physiographic region, and only spreads into the less suitable Great Basin after population density on the Plateau increases. This produces an approximate 300- to 400-year lag between the onset of farming on the Plateau and in the Basin. These findings support the ideal distribution hypothesis for the spread of farming, and suggest a general socioecological process that may help explain global patterns in the timing and tempo of agricultural expansions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might subsistence strategies structure the costs and benefits of habitat selection and, therefore, drive settlement patterning? We explore this question within an Ideal Distribution framework, arguing that (i) a habitat can be decomposed into its environmental covariates, (ii) their relative contributions to suitability can vary as a function of subsistence strategy, and (iii) the resulting differences will in turn lead to different population distributions across habitats. To evaluate these claims, we apply a Poisson point-process modelling approach known as maximum entropy (MaxEnt) to Archaic hunter-gatherer and Formative maize-farmer sites within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Our results show that environmental covariates vary in their importance for each strategy and that the strategies themselves vary in their land use and habitat distribution, with Archaic foragers being widely distributed across space, Formative farmers more densely packed into areas indicative of higher maize productivity. The approach itself also has wide application to other subsistence strategies, including horticulture and pastoralism, across a range of environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fremont provide an important case study to examine the resilience of ancient farmers to climatic downturns, because they lived at the far northern margin of intensive maize agriculture in the American West, where the constraints on maize production are made abundantly clear. Using a tree-ring and simulation-based reconstruction of average annual precipitation and maize growing degree days, along with cost-distance to perennial streams, we model spatial variability in Fremont site density in the eastern Great Basin. The results of our analysis have implications for defining the ecological envelope in which farming is a viable strategy across this arid region and can be used to predict where and why maize farming strategies might evolve and eventually collapse as climate changes over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]