The Mosida Site: A Middle Archaic Burial from the Eastern Great Basin

The fortuitous discovery of a middle Archaic burial at an open site on the shore of Utah Lake in the eastern Great Basin, therefore, is important as it provides scarce information about: 1) burial patterns; 2) the health and stature of indigenous populations; 3) ideology; and 4) the relationship between dogs and people during the mid-Archaic Period. Copyright Information: All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for any necessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn more at http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse Joumal of Califomia and Great Basin Anthropology Vol. 14, No. 2. pp. 180-200(1992). The Mosida Site: A Middle Archaic Burial from the Eastern Great Basin JOEL C. JANETSKI, Dept. of Anthropology, Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT, 84602. KAREN D. LUPO, JOHN M. McCULLOUGH, and SHANNON A. NOVAK, Dept of Anthropology, Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. 1 HE Archaic Period (8,000 B.C. to A.D. 500) in Utah is best known through numerous cave excavations. Danger Cave, Hogup Cave, the Promontory caves, Spotten Cave, Cowboy Cave, and others contained layer after layer of dry, cultural deposits evidencing human presence and hinting at the activities carried out at these sheltered sites over thousands of years (see Jennings 1978 and Aikens and Madsen 1986 for reviews of this work). Despite the tons of dirt excavated at such sites, surprisingly few remains of the people themselves have been found (see Smith 1952 and Buettner-Janusch 1954 for an important, but poorly dated, exception). The fortuitous discovery of a middle Archaic burial at an open site on the shore of Utah Lake in the eastern Great Basin, therefore, is important as it provides scarce information about: 1) burial pattems; 2) the health and stature of indigenous populations; 3) ideology; and 4) the relationship between dogs and people during the mid-Archaic Period. UTAH VALLEY AND SITE SETTING Utah Valley lies in the shadow of the Wasatch Range on the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The valley is home to Utah Lake, a large, shallow, fresh body of water that in precontact times contained a highly productive fishery and numerous other wetlands-related plant and animal resources (Heckman et al. 1981; Janetski 1991). These abundant resources. along with reliable fresh water from streams draining the Wasatch Mountains, attracted people in prehistory as they have in historic times (the Wasatch Front area is the population hub of Utah). Steward (1938:49), for example, stated that aboriginal populations in Utah Valley at the time of Euroamerican contact were among the densest in the Great Basin. Archaeological data tend to support the pattem of relatively high population density for the more distant past as prehistoric sites are common in Utah Valley along streams and the lake shore (Janetski 1990a, 1990b). Fremont (farming) sites dating between A.D. 900 and 1300 are abundant, while open Archaic (prefarming) occupations are rare, especially in the heavily farmed and developed valley bottom. Prior to the discovery of the Mosida Burial and the associated scatter of artifacts, only one lake shore site could confidently be assigned to the Archaic Period. A similar pattem of scarce Archaic presence occurs to the north around the edge of the Great Salt Lake where no occupations have been identified (cf. Simms et al. 1991), although Archaic use of nearby caves was heavy. The reasons for this apparent scarcity of open Archaic sites are likely related to sedimentaUon and erosion; i.e., the older sites are either buried or washed away. The Mosida Burial (42Ut808; named for a nearby abandoned town) lies on a broad, flat beach on the southwest shore of the lake (Fig. A MIDDLE ARCHAIC BURIAL FROM THE EASTERN GREAT BASIN 181 Fig. 1. Location of the Mosida Burial in Utah Valley. 182 JOURNAL OF CALIFORNIA AND GREAT BASIN ANTHROPOLOGY 1). The elevation here is about 1,367 m. (4,485 ft.). There is no visible fresh water source in the immediate vicinity of the site, although in the past Currant Creek flowed into Goshen Bay about 8.5 km. to the south. Modem vegetation along the shore is affected by the highly dynamic character of the lake which fluctuates from 1 to 1.2 m. annually due to its use as a reservoir. However, introduced species (Tamarisk, Tamarix sp. and Russian olive, Oleaster angustifolia) flourish along the shoreline, and native plants (bulmsh, Scirpus spp., grasses, and weeds) are still common along the beach. The burial was located at the north end of an extensive lake edge scatter of prehistoric cultural debris which included grinding implements (one-handed, bun-shaped manos and large slab metates), several well-thinned bifaces, a few flakes, and a stone net-sinker. No clearly temporally diagnostic artifacts (ceramics or projectile points) were found in this scatter. At the tune of the excavation no artifacts or human remains were noted on the surface of the burial pit, although darkly stained sediments were clearly visible. Some disturbance had been caused by the discoverers and the Utah County Sheriff who removed a portion of the burial to determine its age. The rest of the burial was excavated with routine archaeological procedures exposing the remaining skeletal materials as illustrated in Figure 2. All excavated sediments, which were very wet and difficult to control, consisted of fine lake silts which tended to be light gray outside of the pit and darkly stained within it. Excavations were restricted to the burial pit and the immediate vicinity. All sediments were either collected or water screened using 1/8-in. sieves. Notably, the Sheriff did the majority of his subsurface probing in the north and east half of the burial pit near the legs and pelvic regions, although he did remove the skull and some ribs. The Burial The burial pit contained the skeleton of a man and a dog, and assorted burial items. The pit was symmetrical and oval-shaped with the long axis oriented southwest-northeast. It measured 1.25 m. by 1.85 m. The depth was difficult to determine as lake action had eroded the surface of origin for the pit and mixed the sediments overlying and, to a certain extent, within the burial (see Simms et al. 1991 for a discussion of similar problems in burial recovery on the Great Salt Lake). Only about 15 cm. of burial fill appeared to be intact. The man lay on his back on the north side of the pit with his head to the southwest and legs flexed (Fig. 2). The dog lay at the south edge of the burial pit with its head toward the east. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is assumed that the dog and the man were placed in the pit at the same time.