Known Indian Village on Nevada Peak
MT. JEFFERSON, Nev.-High on this 11,807-foot Nevada mountain, where summer lasts only seven weeks and moaning winds keep you awake nights, scientists have uncovered -apparently untouched - the highest known Indian village in North America.
The village, known as Alta Toquima, was used as a male-only hunting camp 7,000 years ago, then reoccupied seven centuries ago by families who toiled up the steep slopes of Mt. Jefferson - for reasons that may forever remain a mystery.
It is "the most unusual and spectacularly isolated archeological site" discoverer Dr. David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History in New York says he has ever found.
And because it is such a bleak place to live, he says, the village has added to archeologists' understanding of the ability of early native Americans to adapt to harsh conditions.
Barren of Trees
There is little protection from the elements on the three peaks that compose Mt. Jefferson in the Toquima Mountains. The summits and the high meadows between them are barren of trees. There is little more than wind-bent wild grasses and low bushes and lots of rock.
On summer nights, water freezes in bowls and hail and lightning hit without warning. Members of the team who spent 5-1/2 weeks excavating the village this summer suffered bouts of altitude sickness.
The village, about 140 miles east of Carson City, is the highest known seasonally permanent village ever found in North America, Thomas says.
It was reoccupied a century before the Incas built the' 8,000-foot-high city of Machu Picchu in the Andes of South America.
But Machu Picchu was a fortress; there is no evidence yet that the much cruder Alta Toquima Village found here was built for defensive purpose even though its location on the lee side of a rocky bluff gives it natural protection on three sides.
Peaceful Existence
Archeologists who excavated Alta Toquima found evidence of a peaceful - albeit rough - existence for Western Shoshone Indians who lived here off and on for several hundred years. The Indians left the area sometime before the first white man passed through in the early 1800s.
Thomas discovered and named the site in 1978 and led the expedition, which was funded and organized by the Museum of Natural History, National Geographic and the Nevada Desert Research Institute.
Alta Toquima also yielded a treasure trove of ancient Indian artifacts, including thousands of arrowheads, spear points, grinding stones, broken pottery bowls that looked something like flower pots, pipes, bone beads, hide scrapers and other crude tools.
Indians Adapted
Thomas says the discovery has shed new light on the ability of Great Basin Indians, who faced a tough life in lower valleys of arid central Nevada. to adapt to an even harsher environment.
"In terms of its sit-up-and-take-notice value, this find is right up there," be said. "This is a new dimension. I think it opens ups whole new area of physical research."
Thomas says there is evidence that some Plains Indians stayed briefly at high elevations in the Rockies, and there are other high-elevation sites in South America, Tibet and Pakistan-" but this is the only area I'm aware of where Indians were living and supporting themselves off the land, without any domestic plants or animals."
The artifacts suggest Alta Toquima dwellers - probably no more than a few dozen at any time - hunted wild bighorn sheep that once roamed the rugged area.
Used as a Camp
That is what the earlier hunters, probably unrelated to the later Shoshone, did, too - but for shorter periods of time, only using Alta Toquima as a camp.
But Thomas said the later Indians, believed to have migrated from Southern California to parts of Nevada, Idaho and Oregon, lived for entire seasons at Alta Toquima. getting water from a nearby creek and supplementing their meat supply with edible grasses and nuts from limber pines that studded a steep canyon just below the summit zone.
The trees, hauled up a short distance to the village, also provided material for tepee-like roofs on rock-walled pit houses, carved into the side of the mountain slope in one of the few areas protected from the icy, howling winds.
"What we're seeing here is a pretty sophisticated adaptation," he says,' adding that at times the Indians would have faced "arctic" conditions - without the benefit of down parkas and sleeping bags, nylon tents and other mountaineering gear that he and other expedition members relied upon for warmth.
It is believed the Indians had rabbit skin blankets, used sagebrush to make leggings and generally were able to withstand cold.
Thomas thinks Indians may have used Alta Toquima as a backup living site, when lower-elevation pinon pines failed to produce nuts. He says it is possible that over a period of several hundred years the site was used only periodically - with gaps of as much as 15 or 20 years in between.
"I think we can see it as another piece in the puzzle of how these Indians made a living," he said.
Thomas isn't speculating on whether some religious motivation drew the Indians to the location. However,