PAUKETAT-Chapter 16-Revised Proof 185 November 26, 2011 11:09 AM GREAT BASIN FORAGING STRATEGIES Christopher Morgan and Robert L. Bettinger he whole of nature . . . is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and the passive. —William Ralph Inge (1922) Conceptualizing foraging strategies dominates the study of pre-Columbian human behavior in the Great Basin. he reason for this is that since at least the early 20th century Great Basin anthropological thinking has been predominantly “gastric”—guided by the idea that subsistence concerns have driven most re- gional cultural developments and thus explain things like technology, social structure, settlement, and even ideology (Zeanah and Simms 1999). So asking (and answering) questions about how and why foraging strategies evolved in the Great Basin is really a matter of explaining how and why foragers behave the way they do, particularly in the high-desert steppes of intermountain western North America. hese questions hinge on a dialectic of competing hypotheses and resulting syntheses that describe foraging strategies, model foraging behaviors, and explain foraging variability across space and through time in the Great Basin. hese descriptions, models, and explanations inform, as much as they relect, the development of hunter-gatherer theory through the 20th and 21st centuries. he Great Basin has been deined many ways—physiographically, hydrologically, loristically, and ethnographically—but generally entails the region between the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges to the west, the Rocky Mountains to the east, the deserts