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1 <br />i <br />' Complete and reliable settlement data were available for a <br />total twenty two prehistoric sites on Rabbit Mountain and Indian <br />1 Mountain and two sites on the valley floor. Investigation of these <br />data revealed several trends which appeared to define at least <br />certain aspects of the settlement, subsistence, and land use <br />' strategies employed by prehistoric groups within the Study Area. <br />Data were available for all sites on six environmental <br />variables: slope, elevation, distance to water, aspect, vegetation <br />zone, and land form. Site attributes available for analysis <br />' included area, stone circle frequency, ground stone frequency, and <br />flaked stone frequency. Sites occurred exclusively in locations <br />characterized by slopes of 8 degrees or less, with an average site <br />slope of 3.18 degrees, and within 200 meters of surface water. <br />All sites occurred between 1612 meters and 1760 meters above mean <br />' sea level; south and east facing exposures were preferred, with an <br />average directional exposure of 150 degrees (south-southeast). <br />' There was no substantial difference between Rabbit Mountain and <br />Indian Mountain in terms of predominant exposures of site locations <br />or other environmental factors. <br />Vegetation could be divided reliably into three general <br />categories: shrub, grassland and pine forest with the majority of <br />sites in the grassland zone on terraces, saddles, ridge crests, and <br />hill tops. Terraces and saddles contained the greatest number of <br />sites; hill tops and hill slopes contained the least. <br />Sites located on terraces contained significantly greater <br />numbers of ground stone artifacts than did sites located on other <br />land forms. Conversely, sites located on ridge tops contained <br />significantly greater numbers of stone circles than did sites <br />located on other land forms. Chi-square analysis, a statistical <br />procedure that measures the likelihood of dichotomous events <br />resulting from chance or other factors, indicated there was less <br />than one chance in one thousand that this trend resulted from <br />random biases in the site sample (see Table 7). The data indicate <br />' 68 <br />1 <br />