Spirit Cave Resilience: How Do We Explain a 10,000-Year Continuity?

Abstract

Paleoindians buried Spirit Cave Man in a Nevada cave, and archaeologists excavated these remains in 1940. Radiocarbon testing in 1996 dated the burial and associated grave goods as older than 10,700 years. Living just 10 miles from Spirit Cave, the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe filed a NAGPRA claim in 1997 requesting the repatriation of the Spirit Cave ancestor they call “The Storyteller.” This claim ignited a 20-year legal dispute that led the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe to make the gut-wrenching decision to permit DNA testing. This article documents a 10,000-year genetic continuity firmly linking Paleoindians at Spirit Cave to the Lovelock culture and that strongly suggests continuities to modern Paiutes living there today with no population replacement. We explore the associated radiocarbon record of these dynamics to understand the syncopated population movements that responded to shifting resource distributions. Resilience theory provides an operational way to understand this extraordinary continuity through key concepts, including tipping points, early warning signals, sunk-cost effects, and loss-of-resilience hypotheses. The Spirit Cave case also underscores the moribund concepts and assumptions underlying a century of Great Basin anthropological study that misread this long-term episode of Indigenous resilience and survivance.