The Great Basin of Western North America is one of the. legendary deserts of the world. This rugged, wide open, and apparently harsh landscape has long served as a backdrop for human drama. Gold seekers and immigrants of the 19th century immortalized the rigors of travelling across the Great Basin on their way to greener grass in California and Oregon. But archaeological research has shown that human occupation of the Great Basin dates back for thousands of years, and ethnographic accounts of Native Americans who lived in this desert have played an important role in the development of concepts of hunter-gatherer subsistence and settlement patterns. It is the Indians of the Great Basin that Julian Steward (1938) studied for his well-known model of sodo-political organiza­tion and evolution (Steward 1955; also see Service 1975), Jesse Jennings (1957) later used Steward's model in his development of the Desert Culture concept, which was widely adapted to other North America deserts.