Dendroarchaeology of the Range Creek Fremont

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With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Ronald Towner, Renee Barlow, and Matthew Salzer will conduct two seasons of tree-ring research on the largest set of pristine Fremont archaeological sites yet identified. As one part of a larger collaborative effort involving students from four universities and volunteers from two interest groups, the project will significantly enhance our scientific understanding of the Fremont culture of northeastern Utah (AD 800-1300) including its florescence as an agricultural society and demise prior to Euroamerican contact. The team will also examine variations in rainfall patterns in the area for the past 800-1000 years and relate such changes to changing Fremont, Ute, and historic ranching land use patterns. The goals of the project are to collect and date tree-ring samples from as many as 50 previously unknown Fremont structures, develop multi-century long tree-ring chronologies, reconstruct precipitation patterns of northeastern Utah for the past thousand years, and create models of human/environment interaction in semi-arid environments that may have global applications.As part of this effort, the investigators will train undergraduate and graduate students, and volunteers, in the proper collection of archaeological and live-tree samples so that they will be able to continue the research after the end of the project. Both graduate and undergraduate students will use the project data as part of their research projects.This project is a unique and exciting opportunity to develop collaborations between different universities and interest groups while researching pristine Fremont archaeological sites, climate variability for the past 1000 years, and the myriad ways people adapted to their semi-arid environment in good times and in bad times. The project will provide the basis for major revisions in the scientific understanding of the Fremont and to understanding human/environment interactions.