People
While there is as yet no firm consensus as to the Fremont comprising a single, cohesive group with a common language, ancestry or lifeway, there are several aspects of their material culture that give credence to this notion. First, it is well known by researchers that those referred to as the Fremont lived a lifestyle that revolved largely around foraging and corn horticulture, in other words a continuum of fairly reliable subsistence strategies that no doubt varied from place to place and time to time. This shows up in the archaeological record at most village sites and long term camps as a collection of butchered, cooked and then discarded bone from mostly deer and rabbits, charred corn cobs with the kernels removed, and wild edible plant remains. Other unifying characteristics include the manufacture of relatively expedient gray ware pottery and a signature style of basketry and rock art. Most of the Fremont lived in small single and extended family units comprising villages ranging from two to a dozen pithouse structures, with only a few having been occupied at any one time. Still, exceptions to this rule exist (partly why the Fremont have earned a reputation for being so hard to define), including an unusually large village in the Parowan Valley of southwestern Utah, the large and extensively excavated village of Five Finger Ridge at the above mentioned Fremont Indian State Park, and others, all appearing to be anomalous in that they were either occupied for a long period of time, were simultaneously occupied by a large number of people, 60 or more at any given moment, or both.
Fremont people generally wore moccasins like their Great Basin ancestors rather than sandals like the Ancestral Puebloans. They were part-time farmers who lived in scattered semi-sedentary farmsteads and small villages, never entirely giving up traditional hunting and gathering for more risky full-time farming. They made pottery, built houses and food storage facilities, and raised corn, but overall they lagged behind the major traditions of the Greater Southwest, while at the same time copying hunter-gatherer techniques of their regional neighbors.
Read more about this topic: Fremont Culture
Famous quotes containing the word people:
“Seems like everything people oughta know they just don’t want to hear. I guess that’s the big trouble with the world.”
—Geoffrey Homes (1902–1977)
“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”
—Naomi Wolf (b. 1962)
“I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)