Utahs first Cab Makers and Wearers

By K. Kris Hirst
Updated January 17, 2016.

The Fremont people (called more generally Fremont or Fremont culture) refers to a farming culture that lived in the high sagebrush and pinyon region of the eastern Great Basin and the western Colorado Plateau of the southwestern United States, including portions of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. The artifacts and cultural lifestyle of the Fremont existed from ~1400 and 600 cal BP (~AD 600-1400); archaeological investigations suggest that climate change put an end to the culture.
Subsistence

Fremont farmers lived on a mixed subsistence, growing maize, beans and squash (a combination called the Three Sisters), and supplementing that with hunting and gathering of animals and plants. Wild foods known to have been used by Fremont culture people include mountain sheep, deer and antelope; small game like jackrabbits and hares; and wild plants including pine nuts.
Village Life

The Fremont people built extensive villages of 10 to up to 100 pithouses or more: pithouses are essentially small round dwellings dug partially into the ground, and built up with timber and mud.

It is likely, however, that not all of the pithouses would have been in use at once. Pithouses are not permanent residences; after ten years or so, you need to abandon your pithouse and build another. What today look like enormous villages might have represented a handful of families living in the same place for several decades.

Villages near stream sheds had agricultural fields that were irrigated with excavated ditches. Smaller outlier groups of two or three pithouses (called rancherias) probably served as field houses, stopping points for hunter-gatherers away from home.

For storing grain, the Fremont built communal, rectangular, free-standing, above-ground structures out of adobe brick called granaries. Granaries could be as large as five meters (15 feet) long and hold several cubic meters of grain. Some granaries were built in the middle of villages for communal use; others were placed in hard-to-reach places, in caves and rockshelters or on canyon walls. Archaeologists believe that storing grain in these locations, accessed by ladders or feats of rock-climbing, are evidence that there was competition for stored grain.
Art and Material Culture

Fremont pottery was primarily a gray-pasted ware, sometimes painted with elaborate geometric designs. They made baskets and worked leather, and made polished stone balls and human figurines made of fired clay. The Fremont also made distinctive small triangular notched and projectile points as arrow tips for use with the bow and arrow. Metate slabs and grinding stones were used to grind maize.

The Fremont culture is perhaps best known for their rock art, petroglyphs which have been pecked or painted or both into canyon walls. Many of the images are of rhomboid-bodied, broad-shouldered humans wearing elaborate necklaces, earrings and head dresses. Fired clay human figurines such as those in the Pilling Collection are similarly decorated.
End of the Fremont People

The reason for the disappearance of the Fremont culture is debated in archaeological circles. There definitely was a drought associated with the "Medieval Little Ice Age" (1300-1800), when the climate in the Great Basin became significantly colder and drier, severely impacting the feasibility of farming. Rainfall became less predictable, and most annual moisture came in storms over the winter, rather than during the growing seasons.

At the same time, there is an indication that the Fremont population had grown, leading some researchers to point to a population pressure/climate change scenario as a factor. Competition for the Great Basin region was created by the in-migration of Numic speakers (Shoshones, Utes, Paiutes), who practiced a broad-based hunting and gathering strategy better adapted to the newly arid conditions.
Fremont Culture Sites
Utah: Danger Cave, Cowboy Cave, Big Village, Median Village, Evans Mound, Nawthis Village, Icicle Bench, Lott's Farm, Snake Rock, Huntington Canyon, Caldwell Village, Range Creek Nevada: Pahranagat Valley, O'Malley Shelter, Scorpion Ridge, Steptoe Valley, Amy's Shelter Colorado: Mantle's Cave, Texas Overlook, Sky Aerie, Tamarron
Sources

Barlow, K. R. 2002 Predicting Maize Agriculture among the Fremont: An Economic Comparison of Farming and Foraging in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 67(1):65-88.

Coltrain, Joan B. and Steven W. Leavitt 2002 Climate and Diet in Fremont Prehistory: Economic Variability and Abandonment of Maize Agriculture in the Great Salt Lake Basin. American Antiquity 67(3):453-485.

Hildebrandt, William R. and Kelly R. McGuire 2008 America, North: Great Basin. Pp. 290-300 in Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by Deborah M. Pearsall. Elsevier, London.

Janetski, Joel C. 2002 Trade in Fremont society: contexts and contrasts. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21(3):334-370.

Janetski, Joel C. 1997 Fremont Hunting and Resource Intensification in the Eastern Great Basin. Journal of Archaeological Science 24(12):1075-1088.

Madsen, David B. and Steven R. Simms 1998 The Fremont complex: A behavioral perspective. Journal of World Prehistory 12(3):255-336.

Simms, Steven R. 2008. The Fremont. Chapter 5 (pp. 185-228) in Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. Left Coast Press: Walnut Creek, California.

Metcalfe, Duncan and Lisa V. Larrabee 1985 Fremont Irrigation: Evidence from Gooseberry Valley, Central Utah. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 7(2):244-254. Free download

Ugan, A. 2005 Climate, bone density, and resource depression: What is driving variation in large and small game in Fremont archaeofaunas? Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24(3):227-251.

Fremont culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Typical "Moki Hut" placement in the crevice of the cliff

The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a pre-Columbian archaeological culture which received its name from the Fremont River in the U.S. state of Utah where the first Fremont sites were discovered by local Native Americans known as Utes and Navajo. In the Navajo culture the pictographs are credited to people who lived before the flood. The Fremont River itself is named for John Charles Frémont, an American explorer. It inhabited sites in what is now Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from AD 1 to 1300 (2,000-700 years ago[1]). It was adjacent to, roughly contemporaneous with, but distinctly different from the Ancestral Pueblo peoples located to their south.

Contents

1 Location
2 People
3 Recent developments
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

Location
A Fremont Granary, called Moki Huts locally

Fremont Indian State Park in the Clear Creek Canyon area in south-central Utah contains the biggest Fremont culture site in Utah. Thousand-year-old pit houses, petroglyphs, and other Fremont artifacts were discovered at Range Creek, Utah.[2] Nearby Nine Mile Canyon has long been known for its large collection of Fremont rock art. Other sites are found in The San Rafael Swell, Capitol Reef National Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Zion National Park, and Arches National Park.
People
Fremont petroglyph, Dinosaur National Monument
Fremont Indian petroglyphs in Capitol Reef National Park, southern Utah

Scholars did not agree that the Fremont culture represents a single, cohesive group with a common language, ancestry, or lifeway, but several aspects of their material culture suggests they might be a single ethnic group. First, Fremont culture people foraged wild food sources and grew corn. The culture participated in 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. The Fremont are sometimes thought to have begun as a splinter group of the Ancestral Pueblo people, although archaeologists do not agree on this theory.

According to archaelogist Dean Snow,

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 must have looked like poor cousins to the major traditions of the Greater Southwest, while at the same time seeming like aspiring copy-cats to the hunter-gatherers still living around them.[3]

Snow notes that Fremont culture declined due to changing climate conditions c. 950 CE. The culture moved to the then-marshy areas of northwestern Utah, which sustained them for about 400 years.[4]
Recent developments
Pilling Figurines, unfired clay Fremont figurines, on display in the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum.

The Range Creek Canyon site complex is unambiguously identified with the Fremont culture, and because of its astonishingly pristine state, promises to bring an immense amount of archaeological insight to this hitherto obscure culture.

According to Snow, the Fremont's eventual fate is unknown, but it is possible that they moved into Idaho, Nebraska and Kansas, and may have become part of the Dismal River culture to the east and/or the Ancestral Pueblo communities to the south or absorbed by the arriving Numic-speaking peoples.[5]

a drawing of fremont life
Interesting people!
Rugged mesas and cliffs rising above a valley

Some of the terrain in which the Fremont people successfully lived. This is Range Creek Canyon, Utah.

Utah (and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho) can lay claim to a very unique culture that began to develop about 2,500 years ago.

The people called Fremont Indians by archaeologists lived across much of northern Utah (as far south as Cedar City)—often in rugged places. But they knew how to make the most of where they lived. Depending on the situation, they hunted and gathered or they farmed, or they did both.
What was life like?

The “Fremont” culture was diverse, made up of lots of different groups. Sometimes the people lived in small scatted groups, and sometimes they built large villages. They used both pit houses and houses built of rock and mud.
petroglyphs of mountain sheep and other designs

Petroglyphs (rock art made by chipping the design) made by Fremont, in Range Creek.

Many of the Fremont grew corn and beans. When they hunted, it was often with a bow and arrow, a technology that helped them efficiently kill antelope, mountain sheep, deer, and other animals.

Around 1,000 years ago, the unique Fremont culture began to disappear. People stopped farming in the Utah area, for instance.

Why?

Life may have become tough because of climate change, so they may have had to change their way of life and become hunters and gatherers.

But also, new people—the ancestors of the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones—had moved in to Fremont territory. The Fremont may have been killed or forced to leave, or they may have become absorbed into these new groups.

Or maybe parts of all these three things happened!
What did they leave behind?
archaeologists and volunteers excavating

Archaeologists and volunteers excavate a Fremont campsite at Mushroom Springs, on Antelope Island.

Fremont people left distinct rock art on cliff walls. They also made a unique kind of basket, and they made gray coiled pottery. Like other groups, they left behind grinding stones, arrow points, and other stone tools. Some special Fremont artifacts are little clay people figurines.

Read more about the Fremont culture.

historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/american_indians/thefremont.html

The Fremont

David B. Madsen
Utah History Encyclopedia

The prehistoric societies of the western Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin can be characterized by variation and diversity; they are neither readily defined nor easily encapsulated within a single description. Some people were primarily settled farmers, growing corn, beans, and squash in small plots along streams at the base of mountain ranges; some were nomads, collecting wild plants and animals to support themselves; still others would shift between these lifestyles. In some areas the population was relatively dense; in other places only small groups were found widely scattered across the landscape. People living in this region may even have spoken different languages or had widely divergent dialects. Yet, despite the diversity of these lifestyles and the varied geography which helped structure their actions, these people seem to have shared patterns of behavior and ways of living that tie them together.

Today we call these scattered groups of hunters and farmers the Fremont, but that name may be more reflective of our own need to categorize things than it is a reflection of how closely related these people were to each other. "Fremont" is really a generic label for a people who, like the land in which they lived, are not easily described or classified. The Fremont culture was first defined in 1931 by Noel Morss, a young Harvard anthropology student working along the Fremont River in south-central Utah.

Because the Fremont are not easily categorized and do not readily fit into archaeological classification schemes, they have been a source of confusion and debate among archaeologists since they were first identified in the late 1920s. The differences between the many small bands of the Great Basin and those of the northern Colorado Plateau areas of the Intermountain West were often quite great. As a result, archaeologists have had a difficult time defining just who these people were and how they were related to each other. There are actually few artifact similarities among these groups. While the similarities include such things as a particular way of making baskets, a unique moccasin style, clay figurines, and gray pottery, the problem of categorizing Fremont groups is compounded by a number of factors. The figurines are quite rare, for example, and the baskets and moccasins are perishable materials which do not survive in most archaeological sites. There is, in fact, only one single non-perishable trait which ties these people together--a thin-walled gray pottery whose many variations have been found as far west as Ely and Elko, Nevada, in the central Great Basin, as far north as Pocatello, Idaho, on the Snake River Plain, as far east as Grand Junction, Colorado, at the foot of the western Rocky Mountains, and as far south as Moab and St. George, Utah, along the Colorado and Virgin rivers, respectively.

Most archaeologists believe the Fremont developed out of existing groups of hunter-gatherers on the Colorado Plateau and in the eastern Great Basin. These small groups were, like their Fremont descendants, diverse, flexible, and adaptable. They ranged from fairly large and relatively sedentary populations in environments where resources were more readily accessible, to small, highly mobile family-sized groups where resources were widely dispersed. Over a span of about a thousand years, from sometime after 2,500 years ago to about 1,500 years ago, different groups of these hunter-gatherers gradually adopted, in a piecemeal fashion, many of the traits associated with the farming societies of the Southwest and Mexico.

First, corn and other cultivated plants (called domesticates), initially developed in what is now Mexico, then diffused northward throughout the greater Southwest and were added to the wild food subsistence base of native people sometime about 2,500 to 2,000 years ago in areas on either side of the southern Wasatch Plateau. This early use of corn and other domesticates occurred well before settled villages developed, and it seems that farming at first was just a part-time affair practiced by people who were still essentially nomadic hunters and gatherers. The earliest "Fremont" corn, radiocarbon dated to 2,340-l,940 years ago, comes from a cache near Elsinore, Utah; corn in sites along Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell date to just after the time of Christ. These sites suggest that farming was well established in some areas by 2,000 years ago. Outside this region, however, full-time hunting and gathering lifestyles seem to have continued unchanged. For example, in the deserts of the eastern Great Basin, at all of the many cave sites like Fish Springs, Lakeside, Black Rock, and Danger Cave, domesticates are absent throughout this early period and subsistence was based entirely on wild foods.

Second, between about 2,000 to 1,500 years ago, many of the objects associated with the use of domesticates, such as pottery and large basin-shaped grinding implements, were added to the people's tools. It is noteworthy that Fremont pottery first occurs as early as 1,500 years ago in several caves and rock shelters associated with mobile hunting and gathering groups and is not found in what we think of as settled villages until several hundred years later. The production and use of these tools, in addition to the growing of corn, beans, and squash, appears to have spread to other hunting and gathering groups to the north as well as to both the east and west of the central Wasatch Plateau region. By about 1,300 years ago, sites with corn and pottery are also found in the Uinta Basin and around the Great Salt Lake; and within several hundred years after that, corn and/or pottery are present throughout the Fremont region.

Third, between about 1,750 and 1,250 years ago, architecture at some (but far from all) open sites changed from small, thin-walled habitation structures and subterranean storage pits to larger semi-subterranean timber and mud houses and above-ground mud- or rock-walled granaries. The presence of such substantial buildings suggests that, at some sites at least, some people were becoming more fully sedentary and were relying more on farming than on the collecting of wild foods.

By about A.D. 750 , hunting and gathering groups on the east and west sides of the Wasatch Plateau had adopted and modified many features of settled village life and to a greater or lesser extent had integrated them into their subsistence and settlement patterns. For the next five hundred years or so, this crystallized Fremont pattern remained essentially unchanged in the heartland of the Fremont region, but many of its features, such as its pottery, spread to groups as far away as central Nevada, southern Idaho, northwestern Colorado, and southwestern Wyoming. Whether these items were present in all these areas as the result of trade or local manufacture is presently unclear.

Significantly, there are actually very few common traits that distinguish what can be considered "classic" Fremont. Pithouse villages and farming are found over large areas of the United States about this same time and are not very helpful in distinguishing the Fremont from other groups. Many artifact forms, such as projectile point styles, also are not unique to the Fremont and are not helpful in separating the Fremont from their contemporaries. A number of other material items--such as stone balls, basin-shaped metates with small secondary grinding surfaces, and elongated corner-notched arrow points--are characteristic of the Fremont, but they are either so variable from place to place, or so limited in distribution, that they are not very useful traits for distinguishing the Fremont.

Fortunately, there are four relatively distinctive artifact categories which do distinguish the Fremont, materially, from other prehistoric societies. Unfortunately, they are only rarely found together. \



The first is a one-rod-and-bundle basketry construction style so unique that it has led some to suggest that the Fremont culture can be defined on the basis of this single artifact category alone. This technique is markedly different from that used by both contemporary Anasazi groups and from later historically known Numic-speaking groups such as the Ute and Shoshoni.


A second trait is a unique "Fremont" moccasin style constructed from the hock of a deer or mountain sheep leg. This and other moccasin types found in Fremont sites are very different from the woven yucca sandals of the Anasazi.


A third item is actually an art style represented in three dimensions by trapezoidal-shaped clay figurines with readily identified hair "bobs" and necklaces. These same trapezoidal figures are depicted in Fremont pictographs and petroglyph panels. Magic and/or religious functions have been ascribed to these painted and sculpted figures, but no one really knows their purpose or meaning.


The fourth and last major artifact category is the gray, coil pottery which is most often used to identify archaeological sites as Fremont. This pottery is not very different from that made by other Southwestern groups, nor are its vessel forms and designs distinct. What distinguishes Fremont pottery from other ceramic types is the material from which it is constructed. Variations in temper, the granular rock or sand added to wet clay to insure even drying and to prevent cracking, have been used to identify five major Fremont ceramic types. They include Snake Valley gray in the southwestern part of the Fremont region, Sevier gray in the central area, Great Salt Lake gray in the northwestern area, and Uinta and Emery gray in the northeast and southwestern regions. Sevier, Snake Valley, and Emery gray also occur in painted varieties. A unique and beautiful painted bowl form, Ivie Creek black-on-white, is found along either side of the southern Wasatch Plateau. In addition to these five major types found at Fremont villages, a variety of locally made pottery wares are found on the fringes of the Fremont region in areas occupied by people who seem to have been principally hunters and gatherers rather than farmers.

At the height of this classic Fremont period, about 1,000 years ago, people who in one way or another fit the rather broad description of Fremont could be found from what is now Grand Junction, Colorado, on the east to Ely, Nevada, on the west. They lived as far north as modern Pocatello, Idaho, and on the south to present-day Cedar City, Utah.
Pictographs at Capitol Reef

Pictographs in Capitol Reef National Monument
Petroglyphs, Nine Mile Canyon

Petroglyphs, Nine Mile Canyon, 1978
Fremont petroglyphs

Fremont petroglyphs

After about A.D. 1250, the Fremont as an identifiable archaeological phenomenon began to disappear in much the same uneven fashion that it appeared. That is, between the years 1250 and 1500, classic traits such as one-rod-and-bundle basketry, thin-walled gray pottery, and clay figurines disappear from the Fremont region. No one can quite agree on what happened, but there seem to be a number of interrelated factors behind this change. Two seem most likely. First, climatic conditions favorable for farming seem to have changed during this period, forcing local groups to rely more and more on wild food resources and to adopt the increased mobility necessitated in collecting wild food. By itself, however, this climatic change probably would not have resulted in the Fremont demise, because the flexibility and adaptability which characterized the Fremont had allowed them to weather similar changes. However, new groups of hunter-gatherers appear to have migrated into the Fremont area from the southwestern Great Basin sometime after about 1,000 years ago. These full-time hunter-gatherers were apparently the ancestors of the Numic-speaking Ute, Paiute, and Shoshoni peoples who inhabited the region at historic contact, and perhaps they displaced or replaced the part-time Fremont hunter-gatherers with whom they were in competition.

Whether or not Fremont peoples died out, were forced to move, or were integrated into Numic-speaking groups is unclear, and even the matter of the postulated Ute/Paiute/Shoshoni migration remains a matter of spirited debate. It appears that the sudden replacement of classic Fremont artifacts by different kinds of basketry, pottery, and art styles historically associated with Utah's contemporary native inhabitants suggests that Fremont peoples were, for the most part, pushed out of the region and were replaced rather than integrated into Numic-speaking groups. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that the most recent Fremont or Fremont-like materials, dating to about 500 years ago, are found at the northern and easternmost fringes of the Fremont region, in the Douglas Creek area of northwestern Colorado and on the Snake River plain of southern Idaho--areas at maximum distance along the postulated migration route of Numic-speaking populations.

See: David B. Madsen, Exploring The Fremont (1989).