Women are becoming more and more prominent in all aspects of modern mining, especially in the Nevada gold industry, which gave birth to a lobbying organization called Women in Mining a few years ago. A Mine of Her Own (University of Nebraska Press, $32.50) shows that women have played important roles throughout the history of mining in the West.

Zanjani is one of Nevada’s most prolific and readable historians. There are epic movies lurking in her books. Here she has mined a rich vein of sources to produce a book that not only adds a series of well told stories to mining lore but that makes a significant contribution to the wealth of Western history. Zanjani makes it impossible to see the prospector as a stereotype. She fills the picture with stories of independent women in the mining camps and wilds of the West from Alaska to Arizona.

Jon Christensen

Do Not Touch Indian Traces

Dennis Cassinelli would have us believe that he advocates a responsible approach to collecting and identifying Indian artifacts. Unfortunately, books such as his Gathering Traces of Great Basin Indians (Western Book/Journal Press, $19.95) basically promote irretrievable loss to archaeological sites.

Anyone seriously interested in the cultural and natural history of the Great Basin would gain much more by reading Donald Grayson’s The Desert’s Past: A Prehistory of the Great Basin, to name just one, then browse the titles available at the Nevada State Museum for the real archaeological work that has been and is being done in this region. Contrary to Cassinelli’s assertions, the literature is quite extensive and very readable.

The real value of Cassinelli’s book is Appendix B, which reprints the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. Before people get any ideas about gathering traces of Native Americans they should know that it’s against the law on public lands. Cassinelli does reiterate several times that it’s a no-no to collect artifacts. But he’s speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He’s actually promoting collecting by describing sites, where they can be found, what he discovered there, and leading you to believe that you too can be an Archaeologist, find things and identify them with the use of his book.

There have been a number of books like this in the Great Basin over the past few decades basically self-published by folks who want to show off their stuff while striking a pseudo-responsible stance. What the authors have really done is obsessively take things from archaeological sites, usually seriously damaging the information value of these sites forever. Archaeology can’t handle any more irresponsible collecting. We’re losing pages and pages from the book of human history in the Great Basin from the collecting of curios, display specimens, or just bright and shiny things for show and tell.

The only way we’re going to read the cultural prehistory of this hemisphere is through the archaeological record. The informational value of the sites depends on the things being there all together as they have lain for hundreds or thousands of years. If some of the things have been relocated to a picture frame in a living room, the record remaining on the site is incomplete. To seriously attempt to read the record we need to see all the pieces in their context. It’s like a book, you need the pages to be in order. You rip pages out of a book and some of the things you take might be so important that you might as well have taken out a whole chapter or series of chapters.

Lynn Nardella