The original mandate of Colleen Beck and the archaeologists at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) was to examine the early material culture of the slice of desert that became the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range and later the Nevada Test Site. It can be hard to imagine anyone actually living there, Beck says, in part because of lingering radioactivity and ongoing nuclear waste research, but evidence is all around. The variety of stone points found on-site shows occupation that goes back through the Paleoindian period to some 11,000 years ago. At a site called Midway Valley, DRI researchers found a quarry for chalcedony and obsidian that was used for thousands of years. And in Fortymile Canyon there are petroglyphs that some interpret as evidence of vision quests.
There are also later habitation sites for Native Americans, as well as for the prospectors, miners, and ranchers who arrive in the mid-nineteenth century. Often clustered around springs, such sites include seasonal camps, rock shelters, cabins, horse corrals, and water troughs, as well as mining equipment and the writer's cabin of B.M. Bower, who wrote dozens of novels set in the American West.
