Paleoindian Land Use at Pluvial Lake Mojave: A Temporally and Seasonally Dynamic Wetlands Resource Patch in California’s Central Mojave Desert

This study creates and preliminarily tests a biotic resource structure and optimal foraging theory inspired land use model for Silver Lake, one of two playa lakes that once formed pluvial Lake Mojave in California's central Mojave Desert. The land use model predicts that when Silver Lake was a high-rank resource patch, Paleoindians optimally decreased inter-basin mobility as part of a wetland stable strategy (WSS); conversely, when Silver Lake was a low-rank resource patch, Paleoindians optimally increased inter-basin mobility using a wetland transient strategy (WTS). Specific land use expectations are developed in 500-year timesteps for the period 14.0-9.0 ka based on yearly and seasonal variations in the productivity of Silver Lake's wetland habitat. Data limitations with the fine-grained version of the model led us to test a simplified version that supports the hypothesis that Paleoindians selected the optimal land use solution, a WTS, when Silver Lake was a low-rank wetlands resource patch during the terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene (TP/EH) and more recent groups a WSS when patch rank improved after the Early Holocene. Though the simplified model's conclusion that Paleoindians employed a WTS during the TP/EH fits the available archaeological evidence at Silver Lake and broader Great Basin/Mojave Desert, it is a static interpretation that implies Paleoindians used a single land use strategy during the several thousand-year TP/EH. This is unrealistic because pluvial lakes were dynamic water bodies that fluctuated through time and directly influenced the extent of and caloric returns from the available wetland habitat. Despite the current inability to test the fine-grained model, which we think would reveal temporal and seasonal variations in Paleoindian land use, not considering or integrating such factors into land use models misses opportunities to better understand the myriad decisions Paleoindians made under ever changing resource structure conditions.