EARLY HOLOCENE ARCHAEOLOGY AT DANGER CAVE, UTAH, USA

Danger Cave is located at the western edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert on the Utah/Nevada line, western USA. This large cave site, at an altitude of 1314 m (at the surface of lake deposits on the floor), is situated approximately 140 m below Pleistocene Lake Bonneville highstand and ~12 m above the Gilbert Shoreline, the level of Lake Bonneville during the Younger Dryas. Besides its extraordinarily rich middle and late Holocene archaeological record, Danger Cave is notable for containing one of the earliest known well-dated human occupations in the Great Basin. A series of small firehearths and associated artifacts lie on a bed of lacustrine sand (Sand I), and date to ~10,300 RCYBP, making them coeval with the Gilbert Shoreline. Danger Cave also provides evidence of the earliest use and processing of small seeds and other low-quality foods in the diets by Great Basin inhabitants. This early record of small seed use by paleoindians at Danger Cave stands out as anomalous in relation to other parts of the Great Basin, but is hampered somewhat by a lack of detail in stratigraphic context, dating, and associated artifact content. New excavations at Danger Cave, coupled with re-analyses of earlier investigations, help to clarify the nature and timing of small seed processing and use at Danger Cave during the early Holocene ~10,000-7000 RCYBP.