On a smoky day last fall, a small party of aging males huffed and puffed its way up above 12,000 feet in the White Mountains, near the California-Nevada border. The winds were strong, and the summit zone—think of the treeless Tibetan Plateau, minus yaks—was seriously cold. The leader of our little expedition, Robert Bettinger, a UC Davis anthropology professor emeritus, carried an ice ax as he meandered up. No reason to hurry, his slouching pace seemed to say, but keep an eye out: there are interesting things all over this ground.
Bettinger should know. Forty-nine years ago, he began exploring in the Whites, looking for signs of prehistoric human presence. The idea that ancient hunters had come up high, tracking mountain sheep, was plausible, but Bettinger looked harder and longer than his peers might have, finding strong evidence to support the hunch. “I looked in places other people didn’t want to look” is how he explains it. Eventually, he found not just the signs of hunting trips but the remains of whole villages, sites where families had come to live for a while, venturing into the mountains as soon as the snows melted out in summer. The discovery of this intermittent use, which continued for over a thousand years, went against conventional wisdom about hunter-gatherers: why make the trip to the nosebleed zone, bringing your vulnerable women and children, when you could stay down in the Owens Valley, fishing and hunting and harvesting berries and roots and maybe even lolling in the local hot springs on occasion?
“No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,” Hemingway writes in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” He’s referring to the corpse of a big cat found at 19,710 feet in Africa. Bettinger may not have explained, to the satisfaction of all other anthropologists everywhere, what these ancient people were doing up so high, but that they were colonizing the really rugged places, gaining sustenance from a harsh alpine environment, is now no longer in doubt.
Bettinger stops on a patch of scrubby ground. He, a career-crowning volume published in 2015. It takes as its subject the past 15,000 years in Native California and points east, attempting a grand synthesis of all the moving parts, all the social, political, and environmental changes over that vast sweep of time, somehow fitting everything into 10 very readable chapters.
