In the Shadow of the Steamboat: A Natural and Cultural History of North Warner Valley, Oregon Volume 137

"This volume tracks 13,000 years of environmental and cultural change in North Warner Valley, Oregon. Though other parts of the Oregon Desert have been studied by scientists for almost a century, North Warner Valley largely escaped researchers' attention until recently. A decade of fieldwork and laboratory analyses has revealed a record of human activity that waxed and waned with local and regional environmental and social change. The studies of the landscape, lithic technology, plant and animal foods, and bone and shell objects presented in the volume, which come mostly from a stratified rock shelter record that spans almost ten millennia but also dozens of open-air sites, tell a story of people-most often families-who visited North Warner Valley periodically to collect marsh plants, rabbits, and other resources. Those people had ties to groups living in northwestern Nevada, central Oregon, and even the Pacific Coast. Smith and colleagues present their work in a way that allows readers to not only understand how people adapted to local change but also how North Warner Valley fit into the complex mosaic of pre-contact history in the American West that began during the late Pleistocene and continued until recent times. The volume outlines the most comprehensive research effort to be conducted in the northern Great Basin in more than two decades, and the multidisciplinary nature of the work should interest students of natural and cultural history, archaeology, and Indigenous lifeways"--