Stillwater Marsh is an archaeology locality in the Carson Sink in western Nevada discovered when heavy flooding in the 1980s unearthed many human remains.
The great diversity in plant life and altitudinally-determined microenvironments that surrounded the marsh helped to make it a popular place to live, as evidenced by archaeological findings.
As large numbers of skeletons had not previously been found at Great Basin sites, Stillwater Marsh offered a remarkable opportunity to learn about daily life, as reflected in the human remains.
[2] A 10,520-acre (4,260 ha) area of the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 as Stillwater Marsh, which provides limited protections.
[9] While not exactly a sample of the population, these three young skeletons seem to indicate that appropriate nutrition may not have always been available for children, whose immune systems were still developing, leaving them more susceptible to infection.
The amount of effort required to remove the soft tissues in joints, leaving just bone-to-bone contact, such as in the hips or knees, is immense.
With the exception of the amount of osteoarthritis represented in the skeletal remains, the Stillwater Marsh people fit the definition of a hunter-gatherer society; the males ventured away from camping sites to hunt game, while the females remained close to the campsites gathering nuts, plants, and other foodstuffs [3] It is evident, though, from the bones that they had to work more to meet their nutritional requirements than many other hunter-gatherer societies.
[10] Evidence from the skeletal remains shows that the majority of joints were affected by eburnation, including the jaw, ankles, wrists, and elbows, in addition to the hips and knees.
In the case of the Stillwater Marsh people, it seems more likely that continual movement of the joints, making bone come through the tissue layers, is the cause of their osteoarthritis.
[12] A study done by Clark Spencer Larsen and Christopher B. Ruff on bones collected by the Nevada State Museum provides support for age and nutritional deficiencies as factors for osteoarthritis.
Nutrition is believed to be the major cause of the amount of bone loss based on the relatively young age, when compared to other prehistoric populations, at time of death of most of the skeletons.
[13] An additional feature found on the teeth of the Stillwater Marsh people were hypoplasias, disturbances in the normal formation of enamel caused by nutritional and environmental stresses on the body.
The number of human remains found suggests that the Marsh was one of the more populous regions in the Great Basin, indicating that the people living there has to become adept at using all of the natural food resources at their disposal.
[8] This seemingly indicates that they provided a continual food source for when people lived in the Marsh, as opposed to when they moved into the uplands for part of the year.
[8] The people used smaller tui chubs as a food source, as evidenced by the amount of skeletal remains of the fish found throughout the locality's sites.
[21] Small mammals, mainly rodents, provided nutrition for the Stillwater Marsh people when fish, like the tui chub, and birds were out of season.