Fremont Culture

 

Throughout central Utah, and into very eastern Nevada and western Colorado, archaeologists have uncovered the remnants of an archeological culture they call the Fremont, named for the Fremont River in Utah.

The Fremont differed in several ways from their more famous contemporaries in the 11th to 14th centuries, the Ancestral Puebloan peoples who built Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Four distinct artifacts set them apart: very unique "one rod and bundle" basketry construction, moccasins constructed from the hock of a deer or sheep leg, trapezoidal shaped figures found as clay figurines and in rock art, and the unique materials used to make their gray, coiled pottery.

Because of a focus on sedentary villages and agriculture, the Fremont culture also stands out from the lifeways practiced by Great Basin tribes before and after it. They built villages of pit houses with adobe structures to store food. They collected wild foods and hunted game, but also cultivated corn, beans, and squash using irrigation techniques. The presence of obsidian, turquoise, and shells show that the Fremont traded with distant villages.

Baker Village

The westernmost known Fremont site, Baker Village, is located only a few miles from Great Basin National Park. Believed to be occupied from 1220 to 1295 C.E., the site had been known to archeologists for many years because of a visible raised mound covered with a scattering of potsherds and chipped stone. From 1991 to 1994 the Brigham Young University, in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management who owns the site, conducted summer excavations at the Baker Archaeological Site.

The excavations revealed a settlement of surprising complexity. Instead of a scatter of pit homes and mud-walled food storage structures, Baker Village consists of an organized cluster of over 15 buildings built according to a specific plan and aligned to a single compass direction. In the center, a larger mud-walled structure shows intriguing alignments with sunrise on the winter and summer solstices.

 

Rock Art

Evidence of the Fremont can also be found in local rock art. Upper Pictograph Cave, in Great Basin National Park, contains pictographs believed to be painted by the Fremont. The figures painted onto the rock surface with an organic pigmented mixture resemble both animal and human forms, and contain the classic Fremont style trapezoidal shapes. Other creations are more abstract, consisting of lines or dots.

 

Adaptation

The villages, agricultural strategy, and unique artistic elements of the Fremont Culture fade from the archeological record between 1300 and 1500 C.E. The cause of this change remains a subject of archeological inquiry, but most archeologists highlight two factors.

First, the Great Basin, already a challenging environment for farming, seems to have become drier during this period. As local groups responded by relying more and more on wild food resources and increased mobility to access different seasonally available foods, the archaeologically distinct Fremont villages were no longer used.

Linguistic evidence suggests that many words in the Numic languages (Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone of modern Great Basin residents) spread into the area from the southwestern Great Basin around the same time. Although the connection between the people who brought these words, the Fremont, and the modern Tribes of the Great Basin are unclear, some archaeologists contend that the groups spreading across the Great Basin arrived with other cultural traits, including a smaller band structure and foraging strategies that helped as the area became more arid.

Learn More

You can visit other Fremont Indian sites in Utah at Fremont Indian State Park, Zion National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Arches National Park, and in Colorado at Dinosaur National Monument.