Archaeological survey within the Coso Mountains resulted in the discovery of two wooden bows. The artifacts were cached in a rock crevice, and appear to represent sinew-backed, reflexed bows commonly used by Native peoples throughout much of the Great Basin. Due to rapid declines in the use of bow-and-arrow technology brought about by the introduction of guns during the historic period, ethnographic specimens and accounts of how bows were made and used are quite rare. Moreover, it appears that the Coso bows represent the only complete or near-complete examples ever recovered from an archaeological context in southern California and the western Great Basin.

A rich archaeological record spanning much of the Holocene exists in the Coso Range of southeastern California. An archaeological survey of over 2,564 acres was focused within the pinyon-juniper zone of these uplands at Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake. In total, 184 prehistoric sites were recorded, and are used here to evaluate a series of alternative models regarding the origins of intensive pinyon nut use in the southwestern Great Basin. These findings indicate that fully-ripened nuts were probably used on a regular basis deep into antiquity, but the more intensive(and expensive) harvest of green-cone pinyon nuts largely occurred after 1,350 B.P This conclusion has important implications for interpreting prehistoric land-use patterns in the region, and supports earlier hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for the spread of Numic populations during the later phases of prehistory.