Evaluation of Early Human Activities and Remains in the California Desert

The desert quarter of California lies open for change and/or destruction. This report presents the area's demonstrated wealth of prehistoric information that still is little known, uncorrelated, controversial and fragile. To justify the large sums already expended on archeological surveys of CDCA, it is now essential to create a public document that goes much further. Our research outlines a story of desert prehistory --the searches of Rogers, the Campbells, Simpson, Begole, Childers, Alsoszatai-Petheo and Davis show that certain desert interfaces contain some of the oldest and richest prehistoric study areas in the New World. These natural laboratories for research must be preserved.

General Editor Eric Ritter writes in his comment that: "Dr. Davis and her colleagues have presented a diverse and revealing set of papers in this volume. The views herein are certainly provocative~ sure to bring about lively discussions. There is no doubt that desert researchers and managers will have to give them attention in their work and that the student or layperson will appreciate reading viewpoints less bounded by what might labeled as traditional academic conservatism...The authors are to be congratulated for so candidly expressing their views." These views are not the widely accepted interpretations of the chronology of human occupation of the area now referred to as the California desert.

Originally the information in this record was migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. In 2014, as part of its effort to improve tDAR content, the Center for Digital Antiquity uploaded a copy of the document and further improved the record metadata.