Year of Award

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

Anthropology (Cultural Heritage and Applied Anthropology Option)

Department or School/College

Anthropology

Committee Chair

Dr. Anna Prentiss

Committee Co-chair

Dr. G.G. Weix

Commitee Members

Dr. Douglas McDonald, Dr. Fernando Sanchez

Keywords

Indigenous Trails, Travel Corridors, Cultural Landscapes, Sierra Nevada, North Fork Mono, Critical Cartography

Subject Categories

Archaeological Anthropology | Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis | Folklore | Historic Preservation and Conservation | Human Geography | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

This study explores and maps an ancient, historic, and contemporary travel corridor that follows the San Joaquin River in the Central Sierra Nevada of California. It is called the Nium or People’s Trail by the North Fork Mono Tribe, the French Trail in historic archives, and the Mammoth Trail on contemporary US Forest Service maps. When I agreed to the request by Chairman Ron Goode of the North Fork Mono Tribe to map the Nium Trail, I was saying yes to a different, more broad and inclusive approach than I had previously taken as an archaeologist documenting archaeological sites and other cultural resources as discrete features. Goode challenged me to see the old trails (now turned into roads, overgrown, and not readily visible) connecting archaeological sites, creek crossings, plant gardens, meadows, and specific places with meaning and stories. He encouraged me to see the Nium Trail not as a distant, isolated feature, but as a Cultural Landscape connected in time, space, and meaning.

Because of the broad and holistic nature of this assignment, it required using multidisciplinary methods from ethnography, history, archaeology and cartography, which I applied to the study and mapping of the emergence, use, governance, and significance of the Nium Trail. I rooted the methodology in a framework of community-based research and decolonizing methods (Smith 2001) as well as collaborative research (Lassiter 2005) and critical cartography (Crampton and Krygier 2006). The purpose of this research is to provide a case study on how a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach can be applied to research and documentation of Cultural Landscapes. The products of this research can be duplicated by providing an example to other researchers, cultural resource consultants, and natural resource managers on how to use a collaborative and holistic approach informed by Indigenous people and their traditional knowledge of landscapes and places.

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