Native American, Human Geography, Archaeology 

Were the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin 'Paleoindians' in the traditional sense? Were they highly mobile foragers? Did they hunt large, now extinct animals like mammoth, horse, and camel?

Great Basin archaeologists have argued that the earliest inhabitants possessed an organization strategy of mixed Paleoindian and Archaic lifeways, referring to them as Paleoarchaic. Recent excavations of rock shelters and caves, coupled with innovative studies of the surface archaeological record have increased our understanding of human organization in the Great Basin during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.

This volume offers an updated perspective of human ecology and organization during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Great Basin, 13,000–8,000 years ago. Recent research using chronostratigraphic, lithic studies, and new subsistence data adds to the emerging picture of more complex behaviors than initially implied by the big-game hunting characterization. This edited volume contains contributions by a variety of scholars that address chronological and contextual information, technological organization and land-use studies, and reconstruction of subsistence organization. "Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic?" reflects our current understanding of early adaptive strategies in the Great Basin.