Fremont culture

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Typical Moki Hut placement in the crevice of the cliff

A Fremont Granary; called Moki Huts locally

Fremont petroglyph, Dinosaur National Monument

The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a pre-Columbian archaeological culture which received its name from the Fremont River in Utah where the first Fremont sites were discovered. The Fremont River itself is named for John Charles Frémont, an American explorer. It inhabited sites in what is now Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from AD 700 to 1300. It was adjacent to, roughly contemporaneous with but distinctly different from the Anasazi culture.

Fremont Indian State Park in the Clear Creek Canyon area in south-central Utah contains the biggest Fremont culture site in Utah. Other sites are found in Dinosaur National Monument, Zion National Park and Arches National Park.

While there is as yet no firm consensus as to the Fremont comprising a single, cohesive group with a common language, ancestry or lifeway, there are several aspects of their material culture that give credence to this notion. First, it is well known by researchers that those referred to as the Fremont lived a lifestyle that revolved largely around hunting and gathering and corn horticulture, in other words a continuum of fairly reliable subsistence strategies that no doubt varied from place to place and time to time. This shows up in the archaeological record at most village sites and long term camps as a collection of butchered, cooked and then dicarded bone from mostly deer and rabbits, charred corn cobs with the kernals removed, and wild edible plant remains. Other unifying characteristics include the manufacture of relatively expedient gray ware pottery and a signature style of basketry and rock art. Most of the Fremont lived in small single and extended family units comprising villages ranging from two to a dozen pithouse structures, with only a few having been occupied at any one time. Still, exceptions to this rule exist (partly why the Fremont have earned a reputation for being so hard to define), including an unusually large village in the Parowan Valley of southwestern Utah, the large and extensively excavated village of Five Finger Ridge at the above mentioned Fremont Indian State Park, and others, all appearing to be anomilous in that they were either occupied for a long period of time, were simultaneously occupied by a large number of people, sixty or more at any given moment, or both.

[edit] Recent developments

The Range Creek Canyon site complex is unambiguously identified with the Fremont culture, and because of its astonishingly pristine state, promises to bring an immense amount of insight to this hitherto obscure archaeological culture.