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a rock shelter by Southern
Paiute people who lived in
the eighteenth or nineteenth
century a.d., suggesting that this
type of prayerstone was made with-
out detectable change in its decoration
or composition for at least 3 , 000 years.
“How could Southern Paiute ancestors have
participated in practices that spanned mul-
tiple millennia if they only arrived in Nevada a
few hundred years ago?” asks Thomas.
For his part, Bettinger agrees that Thomas’
analysis shows that the act of making and placing
prayerstones seems to be an ancient practice, but
he thinks it’s possible that Numic speakers mov-
ing into the Great Basin could have adopted it
from their predecessors. “Maybe this is an echo
of pre-Numic people’s culture,” says Bettinger.
While it might be possible that some Numic
speakers adopted beliefs that predated their presence,
Thomas says, the archaeological record shows that at least
in the central and southern Great Basin, distinctly Numic
traditions of placing prayerstones began some 5 , 000 years ago,
and were carried forth unchanged into the historic period by
Numic people. “There are no perceivable breaks in prayerstone
practices during that entire period, and no new prayerstone
practices begin within the last 1 , 000 years,” says Thomas. “The
Southern Paiute elders had it right.”I
f theantiquityofprayerstones can help confirm that
Native Nevadans have much more ancient ties to the
central and southern Great Basin than the Numic Spread
theory allows, this could aid Numic people in the future. Fur-
ther evidence that their ancestors lived on the land long before
a.d. 1000 could support their claims to links with ancient sites
on government lands. Eventually, prayerstones might even be
eligible to be returned to the tribes under the terms of the
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
which gives tribes the right to request the return of sacred
items collected on federal land.
The Prayerstone Hypothesis makes a great deal of sense to
Richard Arnold. His Pahrump tribe is native to a valley just
below the Spring Mountains, where so many of the prayer-
stones have been found. Its members take care to safeguard
traditional knowledge about Mount Charleston, the sacred
Nuvagantu. “We’ve known prayerstones were used for a long,
long time,” says Arnold. “The ones we recognize, they retain
the puha, that power that they have always had.” nEric A. Powell is deputy editor at Archaeology.lutionary event,” says Bettinger. “This
wasn’t an invasion, with armies wiping
people out. It wasn’t even particularly
violent, I think. It was simple family
groups moving across the landscape,
making the best of this Great Basin
environment.”
Today’s Numic speakers vehe-
mently disagree with the Numic Spread theory. For
one, there is no commonly recognized Numic oral his-
tory, as would be expected, of recent journeys, nor any
implying their ancestors conquered the land where they
currently live. “We just don’t have any traditions that
suggest the Numic Spread happened,” says Arnold.
Over the years, some scholars have also questioned
whether the archaeological record shows that a single,
recent migration resulted in today’s geographic range
of Numic speakers.
In the early 2000 s, when Thomas first learned
that Southern Paiute elders had identified incised
stones from the Spring Mountains as prayerstones,
he was inspired to resume his studies of the artifacts.
During the 1970 s, when he and his team excavated a
site known as Gatecliff Shelter in central Nevada, they
discovered 428 incised stones in and around the site, the
largest single collection from the Great Basin.
“What the Southern Paiute elders were saying about
prayerstones made perfect sense to me,” says Thomas, who
believes archaeologists need to take Native American ideas
about their past seriously. “But, as a scientist, I had to test the
hypothesis against the archaeological evidence.” Working with
museums and universities across the West, Thomas was able to
document about 3 , 500 known incised stones. Some had been
privately collected and donated to museums, but perhaps one-
third had been excavated from reliably dated archaeological
contexts. These included artifacts unearthed from multiple
layers of rock shelters dating back thousands of years to those
discovered inside a house built by a Western Shoshone family
as recently as 1880.
By surveying the known prayerstones and analyzing where
they had been found, Thomas discovered that the practice
of placing incised stones in the landscape had remained
remarkably consistent for thousands of years in some parts
of the Great Basin. Most were found in deeply important
sacred spaces that corresponded to the logic of puha. These
stones had been tucked into cracks deep inside caves and
houses or left along trails and sacred springs, or at dramatic
points on the landscape.
Thomas also identified four main enduring traditions, or
“constellations of practice,” of decorating prayerstones. One
was the Las Vegas constellation, which includes around 1 , 100
incised stones, including those found in the Spring Mountains.
These differ dramatically from others found in the Great
Basin, and include stones that feature feather-like markings,
called the fringe-flap motif, that were first made as early as
1500 b.c. An incised stone with this same motif was placed in
Three prayerstones unearthed at
Gatecliff Shelter in central Nevada
are among more than 400
incised stones discovered in
and around the site.a
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