If you'd like to visit the moon, but hate flying, you might consider a trip up White Mountain instead. It's a short drive from the flats of Bishop on the eastern edge of California, to where the land starts climbing into the high desert of the White-Inyo Mountain Range.

Things start getting bleak after the Pinyon woodland, above 9,500 feet. Here, one finds groves of Bristlecone pines, famous for being the oldest living organisms on earth. They look it too, with gray trunks and arms twisted and tortured by time and hardship. The oldest known tree is 4,600 years old and still growing.

Above the treeline at 11,500 feet, the place gets more and more desolate the higher you go, until it looks like the moon. The air is thin, and the wind is vicious, but from the 14,250-foot summit, the view is spectacular. An amazing place to visit, but you'd never want to live there.

Indeed, until relatively recently, no one seriously considered that humans ever had lived up there. While the Paiutes and their ancestors had settlements as high 9,500 feet, where they spent each fall and sometimes all winter harvesting pine nuts, archaeologists and anthropologists assumed that above this zone, the resources were too sparse to support any human endeavor more permanent than the occasional hunting foray. It was a big surprise, therefore, when the remains of aboriginal villages were discovered in that stark, inhospitable region between 10,400 and 13,000 feet.

Archaeologist Robert Bettinger in the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis in has been excavating alpine sites in the White Mountains, searching for the clues that will tell him how, when, and why, humans lived in this godforsaken place.

The answers are to be found in the lowland valleys as well as on the harsh mountain slopes. They are part of the story of how eastern California was populated, a story of the changing relationship between the natives and the land. Professor Bettinger and his colleagues must be ecologists as well as archaeological sleuths.

While people have inhabited this region for the last 10,000 years, the first signs of human activity in the uplands date from around 2500 BC. These are "hunting stations" found in Pinyon woodland and all the way up to alpine tundra. They usually consist of a few scattered hunting blinds - low rock walls big enough for one person to wait in ambush for bighorn sheep and deer. The only artifacts left behind are butchering and hunting tools like stone darts and wooden dart-throwers. Such places were meant for temporary hunting parties.

It wasn't until later, around 500 - 600 AD, that people had more permanent settlements in the alpine zone, living in partially underground huts with low circular rocks walls, and central firepits. While the inhabitants still hunted, they also spent considerable time and effort in collecting and preparing plant foods such as roots, grass seeds and berries. Artifacts for grinding and chopping litter the floors of the houses.

It could only have been during the summer months that people occupied alpine dwellings, after which they might have descended to the Pinyon camps that date from around the same time. Even so, when you stand in the freezing wind at one of these stark sites, it's difficult to imagine that anyone could have found enough to eat. What a hard, brutal life it must have been. Why did the ancestral Paiutes come all the way up here?

Professor Bettinger concludes that, ultimately, people were pushed up into the mountains because of competition from other groups in the increasingly populated lowlands. In 2500 BC, when there were plenty of resources for the taking, the only reason to head for the hills was to follow the big game. But over the next 3000 years or as the lowland population grew, some people sought out emptier, although harsher, habitats.

Having said that, the more that Professor Bettinger discovers about ancient life in this inhospitable region, the less he tends to view it as "making the best of a bad job" and the more he sees it as a remarkable series of adaptations that enabled people to harvest an untapped resource. Like the Bristlecone pines that thrive on areas of deplorable soil where nothing else will grow, the ancestral natives excelled in a lifestyle they did not have to share with many others... until the white settlers arrived.

© Kelly Stewart

Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616
e-mail: kjstewart@ucdavis.edu

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