Doctor David Wilcox discusses the Freemont Cultural Tradition in southeastern Utah. Southeastern Utah is especially famous archaeologically for its spectacular rock art panels, which date from at least the middle Archaic to the Historic period using both pictograph and petroglyph techniques. The people responsible for these panels and glyphs were Archaic hunter-gatherers that eventually adopted a form of agriculture with hunting. The Fremont Cultural Tradition is thought to be distinct from eastern and western Anasazi traditions, the Colorado River serves as the primary boundary line between them. Southeastern Utah is a “frontier zone” serving as a “periphery” or “buffer zone” where the Fremont sites of farmsteads or small hamlets contrast ceramically and architecturally with the farmsteads and hamlets of the Virgin, Kayenta and western Mesa Verde populations. The ramifications of political and economic developments by the Eastern Anasazi Tradition populations after 800 AD in the regions west and northwest of the Chacoan World on the Freemont people are an open scientific question as are the relationships of the Fremont populations to their eastern neighbors in the Wyoming Basin and Southern Rockies, and their Great Basin neighbors to the west. Archaeology of Southeastern Utah and Related Areas discusses these marginalized prehistoric populations in southeastern Utah.
Reception and socialization at 7:00 pm, program begins approximately 7:30 pm.
