Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

This paper describes an experiment in which the Bustos site is treated as if it were an ethnoarchaeological situation in addition to being an interesting example of a late prehistoric site in the Great Basin. Ethnoarchaeological studies of site formation processes shaping the structure of sites (e.g., Kent 1984, 1987; O'Connell 1987) have been important to our understanding of site function, task organization, duration of occupation, seasonality, and the role of storage. The archaeological visibility of lightly constructed, perishable structures is another issue. A high percentage of past hunter-gatherer residential behavior has likely left archaeologists with a disproportionate number of lithic scatters, while decayed structures, requiring far more attention to locate, go unrecognized. Inferences from ethnoarchaeology conducted in other regions of the world have been applied to a case in the northeastern Great Basin to help identify the location of small structures whose superstructures have vanished (Simms and Heath n.d.). These kinds of studies hold implications for the use of negative evidence (i.e., the absence of residences) to interpret site function, as well as the assessment of significance, and policies for survey and test excavations in cultural resource management.