Fremont culture

The Fremont culture was a pre-Columbian archaeological culture named after the Fremont River in Utah, where its sites were first recognised. From about AD 1 to 1301 its people inhabited what is now Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado, living adjacent to but distinctly apart from the Ancestral Puebloans to their south. Fremont communities combined maize farming in well-watered valleys with hunting and foraging, dwelling in pithouses and later in surface adobe villages and granaries tucked into cliffs. They are remembered for their rock art: haunting trapezoid anthropomorphs with horned headdresses, mountain-sheep figures and geometric designs pecked across the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau. Fremont pottery was typically grey, coil-made and unpainted, and distinctive one-rod-and-bundle basketry and clay figurines mark their sites. Around 1300, amid drought and the arrival of Numic-speaking peoples such as the Ute and Paiute from the west, the Fremont way of life dissolved; some communities migrated south to join Pueblo towns, while others dispersed into the Great Basin foraging adaptation.