Southeastern Idaho Native American Prehistory and History

by E.S. Lohse

Taken from Manual for Archaeological Analysis: Field and Laboratory Analysis Procedures. Department of Anthropology Miscellaneous Paper No. 92-1 (revised). Idaho Museum of Natural History, Pocatello, Idaho 1993.

 

Protohistoric and Historic Shoshone Period

The transition from protohistoric to historic Shoshonean groups, which hinges on finding European trade goods in association with aboriginal materials, has not been well demonstrated in the archaeological record of this region. Some time after about 300 B.P. or during the Ahvish Phase horses came to the Shoshone and other Plateau tribes. At about the same time, trade goods of metal and glass were passing north in trade from the Spanish Southwest. To date, no professionally excavated stratified site with early European trade goods in definitive association with aboriginal Shoshonean assemblages has been recorded.

The boundary between protohistoric and historic periods for Shoshone has been arbitrarily set at the year 1805, when the first written records of the Upper Snake River Basin were produced by Lewis and Clark (Reed et al. 1986:114).

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