Traditional storytelling is at the heart of Native American culture. Nevada’s tribes have always passed stories down through the generations in order to explain their origins, to illuminate the world around them, and to convey important lessons. The tradition continues today, both on an interpersonal level and captured for posterity in video and audio recordings.

The establishment of Indian reservations and colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave some of Nevada’s tribes greater autonomy, but did not resolve many longstanding inequities. Circumstances improved with the advent of voting rights and citizenship for tribal members, the passage of the federal Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the broader recognition of Nevada’s tribes as sovereign nations.

From L.L. Loud’s excavation of Lovelock Cave in 1912 to the present day, archaeologists have gravitated to sites throughout the state of Nevada. Excavations that started in the mid-1920s at the Pueblo Grande de Nevada (Lost City) in Southern Nevada’s Moapa Valley accelerated in the 1930s with the imminent completion of Boulder (Hoover) Dam, which submerged the site under the waters of Lake Mead.

Anthropological study is generally divided into four sub-disciplines: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology (sometimes considered a separate field). The discipline itself was a product of the late nineteenth century, inspired by the introduction of new ideas including Franz Boas’ principle of cultural relativism, which argued against inherent hierarchies of culture.