Abstract
For more than fifty years archaeologists have wrestled with the archaeological record of the Tahoe Sierra, an area in which chronological control and material preservation have remained generally elusive. This thesis represents an attempt to gain insight into prehistoric human adaptation through changing patterns of residential mobility reflected in Holocene lithic assemblages. As a starting point, this thesis works from the simple hypothesis that residential mobility would have progressively declined through time. The thesis focuses on two aspects of residential mobility: mobility magnitude (i.e. the distances people moved) and mobility frequency (i.e. how often groups of people moved). Bringing to bear a broad range of analyses used profitably by archaeologists in the past, this work intends to measure mobility patterns indirectly as reflected in the lithic assemblages recovered from four sites the Tahoe Sierra: CA-PLA-5, CA-PLA-6, CA-PLA-163, and CA-NEV-13/H. A broad range of analyses were brought to bear, examining both formal tools and debitage. These analyses were based on optimization theories, assuming that people would have designed their technologies to balance a trade-off between the weight of tools carried during residential moves and the utility of the toolkit; where different mobility strategies would be expected to favor an emphasis on one or the other of these factors. In the context of lithic material availability, these analyses were expected to reasonably reflect mobility, assuming that prehistoric populations maximized the efficiency of their toolkits. Though a difficult factor to control, an attempt was made to place these sites in a chronological sequence using radiocarbon dates, obsidian hydration analyses, and projectile point associations. Expectations developed based on the hypothesis were not realized by any of the analyses. These failures were not consistent however—a single assemblage might yield indications of both high and low mobility based on different analyses. The final two chapters of the thesis explore possible reasons behind these failures and suggest new hypotheses that might better explain the results.