Calaveras Heritage Council

The beginning of the Prehistoric Period coincides with a region-wide interval of reduced precipitation known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly.

Early Archaic deposits are quite rare in the Sierra Nevada foothills, identified locally at two sites, both discovered in buried stratigraphic contexts.

Until quite recently, archaeological researchers developed culture-histories for the Sierran foothill region based on the more studied areas of the western Great Basin and California Central Valley.