The pages which follow are a report of the findings from a series of archeological excavations in western Utah. The archeological sites were Danger (42To13), Juke Box (42To20), and Raven (24EK2) caves. Of these three Danger Cave was the most informative and lends its name to the report. Juke Box and Raven provided interesting problems in excavation, but their evidence as to cultural events was meager.

The human story inferred in this report was set in one of the most remarkable of North American environments—the desert West. The natural subsistence resources of this land are today quite sparse; the balance between success and failure in survival has always been delicate. The fact that human groups survived in this environment deserves serious ecological note. Although no intensive study of this aspect of the problem is being undertaken here, the cultural data cannot be appreciated or evaluated without a modicum of information regarding the terrain and the biotic resources of the region.

Now against a regional and local environmental background, I should like to present in simple narrative the Great Basin chapter of the story of man in the western hemisphere as I conceive it.

There are numerous archeologic stations in the west and in the Plains where deep layers of earth, one upon the other, have yielded collections of considerable age. Man’s tools are found, particularly in the Plains, in some of these layers in direct association with animals now extinct. Taken singly these locations tell very little — they are mere paragraphs in a long chapter — about man's history as the western hemisphere was peopled. In the aggregate, however, the findings from these several sites permit a coherent if sometimes skimpy account to be built up.

A detailed account of the excavation pro-procedures used and the problems encountered is an inevitable segment of the report of any archeological project, because the kinds of observations made in archeology and the deductions based upon these observations are rooted in the digging techniques. The critical reader can best evaluate the work and the interpretations based upon it when the conditions of discovery and recovery are understood. Although much of the information regarding the circumstances of finding can be, and often is, woven into the descriptive accounts of artifacts and other data, the serious professional is entitled to a separate statement of the phenomena and problems encountered during the digging.

If the data recovered at the Wendover caves are to be fully evaluated, the student must turn to the geologic and climatic events of the late Pleistocene and the Recent geologic epochs. Some of the cave data may even contribute to the study of the sequence and duration of climatic fluctuations within late Pleistocene and Recent times.

The archeological interest in geologic/climatic matters develops for various reasons. First is the matter of chronology. By means of radiocarbon dating we know that man visited Danger Cave about 9000 B.C. It is necessary to correlate these deposits with already recognized geologic and climatic events. Fortunately for this purpose a fairly specific calendar of geological time exists. If the cave deposits could be correlated with natural events this correlation automatically provides, at very least, estimates of the time of occurrence of the natural cave deposits. Another interest the archeologist has in a valid geologic, and hence climatic, correlation lies in the insight he may gain into the environmental circumstances which man faced at any given time during his conquest of the Americas.

Before outlining this section concerned with material culture I should perhaps try to be explicit about the philosophy which guides me in archeological matters. It is my conviction that archeological work does not transcend antiquarianism (a legitimate and justifiable occupation) unless the specimens and the observational data are regarded as reflecting some cultural situation. For me a continuing circular preoccupation with artifacts is sterile. The only excuse for excavation, it seems, is that ever-present hope that by means of archeological search we can catch a meaningful glimpse of, or a series of moments in, a once dynamic living culture. In this interest, of course, I am not alone.

It seems to me we are interested in archeological specimens because we are in reality, and at some distance, and often obscurely, working with a way of life, for which the observed relationships and the artifacts are the meager documentation. One freely admits that the archeological record is very incomplete; it is, moreover, heavily weighted towards the material things.

In order to discover the typological similarities of the Wendover collections to artifacts from other sites, and the cultural and chronological inferences such similarities give rise to, a series of collections will be reviewed for comparable data. It is again pointed out that the archeologist's universal assumption — that typological identity between specimens implies either direct or indirect cultural contact or chronological equivalence — is only an assumption. Although much archeological reconstruction of history is rooted in this concept, there are no fixed points of certainty which guide the reconstruction. How much of the values of a culture cling to an artifact? Will a new artifact style or a new class of artifacts have marked influence on the total configuration of a lifeway when the object or complex of objects is introduced into a new culture? If so, how long does the process take? Or do new artifacts reflect some culture change already achieved?

Further, the form and stylistic detail of stone and textile objects, for example, appear to be very stable and to change slowly. Hence, artifacts other than pottery must be regarded as not particularly sensitive to change (in contrast to pottery); inferences based on similarities between textiles or stone work, for example, are likely less apt to carry sharp cultural and chronological implications than are those based on pottery styles.

Most of this volume is mere description. This description has been concerned with minutiae. The basic objective of the pages of description and comparison is to discern, if we can transmute description into insight, what significance Danger Cave may have, in broad perspective, for understanding North American prehistory. Perhaps it is correct to regard this entire report as a search for relationships. The question asked is how, if at all, these data are related to other comparable archeological data, and whether inferences about human behavior, culture diffusion and cultural dynamics can be drawn.

So far as a lifeway is concerned, let us again examine the implications of the Wendover data. It had been the hope in the beginning of this study that a thoroughgoing ecological orientation of these data would be feasible.