Redd Center for Western Studies
"First Peoples of Great Salt Lake: A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming"
This is a story of over 700 generations of Indigenous Americans in a cultural landscape centered on — but much larger than — the Great Salt Lake. Behind the archaeology and paleoscience is a story of place, a story of language histories, and the mingling of peoples — indigenous and immigrant. It is a story of cultural resilience, persistence, and change that challenges the pristine myth and the biblical model. It is a story far deeper in time than any familiar genealogy can trace.
Steven R. Simms
Steven R. Simms is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Utah State University. He has received various teaching and research awards and the Ross Peterson Distinguished Lifetime Service Award at USU in 2023. He conducted archaeological field work across the United States and in the Middle East for 50 years and authored over 100 scientific publications.
Simms' books include Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau (2008) and Traces of Fremont: Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah (2010), awarded the Society for American Archaeology Book award in the public audience category and the Utah Book Award for nonfiction.
Simms directed over 60 archaeological projects, including the Great Salt Lake Wetlands Project 1990–93 funded by the state of Utah, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the National Science Foundation. He served on the scientific advisory board of Friends of Great Salt Lake since the organization was founded in 1994. Since childhood, he has hiked the mountains and deserts of the American West and slept on the ground nearly a thousand nights. In retirement he practices social distancing and lives with his partner Judy Nelson, a ceramicist, at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains in Story, Wyoming.
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