The
prehistoric societies of the western Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin can be characterized by variation and diversity; they are
neither readily defined nor easily encapsulated within a single description.
Some people were primarily settled farmers, growing corn, beans, and
squash in small plots along streams at the base of mountain ranges;
some were nomads, collecting wild plants and animals to support themselves;
still others would shift between these lifestyles. In some areas the
population was relatively dense; in other places only small groups were
found widely scattered across the landscape. People living in this region
may even have spoken different languages or had widely divergent dialects.
Yet, despite the diversity of these lifestyles and the varied geography
which helped structure their actions, these people seem to have shared
patterns of behavior and ways of living that tie them together.
Today
we call these scattered groups of hunters and farmers the Fremont, but
that name may be more reflective of our own need to categorize things
than it is a reflection of how closely related these people were to
each other. "Fremont" is really a generic label for a people who, like
the land in which they lived, are not easily described or classified.
The Fremont culture was first defined in 1931 by Noel Morss, a young
Harvard anthropology student working along the Fremont River in south-central
Utah.
Because
the Fremont are not easily categorized and do not readily fit into archaeological
classification schemes, they have been a source of confusion and debate
among archaeologists since they were first identified in the late 1920s.
The differences between the many small bands of the Great Basin and
those of the northern Colorado Plateau areas of the Intermountain West
were often quite great. As a result, archaeologists have had a difficult
time defining just who these people were and how they were related to
each other. There are actually few artifact similarities among these
groups. While the similarities include such things as a particular way
of making baskets, a unique moccasin style, clay figurines, and gray
pottery, the problem of categorizing Fremont groups is compounded by
a number of factors. The figurines are quite rare, for example, and
the baskets and moccasins are perishable materials which do not survive
in most archaeological sites. There is, in fact, only one single non-perishable
trait which ties these people together--a thin-walled gray pottery whose
many variations have been found as far west as Ely and Elko, Nevada,
in the central Great Basin, as far north as Pocatello, Idaho, on the
Snake River Plain, as far east as Grand Junction, Colorado, at the foot
of the western Rocky Mountains, and as far south as Moab and St. George,
Utah, along the Colorado and Virgin rivers, respectively.
