Daron Duke is a Far Western Principal and the Director of our Desert Branch in Henderson, Nevada. He also serves as Vice President of Nevada services, which includes our Great Basin Branch in Carson City, and the Director of Far Western’s X-ray fluorescence (XRF) laboratory.
Daron’s experience spans over 25 years in the Desert West, where he remains fascinated by how people innovated their way to thousands of years of success and diversity in such a demanding landscape. His research emphasizes stone technology, paleoenvironmental modeling, and collaboration with Native American specialists to enrich this story. Prominent examples include the user-friendly Obsidian Hydration Dating Workbook, his long-term efforts with the late Pleistocene archaeology of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert, and the outreach film A Point in Time, which was developed as part of Far Western’s work with the Nevada BLM’s Lincoln County Archaeological Initiative. All of this work was fostered by heritage management projects.
Daron’s scientific and collaborative expertise is invaluable when faced with evolving standards in cultural resource evaluation. His experience encompasses diverse regulatory settings and industries, and he has long-term ties with regional tribes and tribal groups. Recent projects include survey, excavation, and sensitivity modeling on lands managed by the BLM, USFS, and U.S. military. He has a strong background in the energy sector, where he has directed transmission, fiber, and pipeline projects for NV Energy, Southern California Edison, and PG&E. Daron is permitted by the Bureau of Land Management as a Principal Investigator in Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona, and Oregon.
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Daron’s Featured Projects
- Hill Air Force Base Utah Test and Training Range
- Lincoln County Archaeological Initiative
- Nellis Air Force Base Belted Range Inventory
Daron’s Featured Publications
Duke, D., Wohlgemuth, E., Adams, K. R., Armstrong-Ingram, A., Rice, S. K., & Young, D. C.
2022
Earliest evidence for human use of tobacco in the Pleistocene Americas. Nature Human Behaviour 6, 183–192. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01202-9
Palacios-Fest, M., Duke, D., Young, D., Kirk, J., and Oviatt, C.
2022
A Paleo-Lake and wetland paleoecology associated with human use of the distal Old River Bed Delta at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Bonneville Basin, Utah, USA. Quaternary Research, 106, 75-93. https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2021.49.
Smith, G. M., Duke, D., Jenkins, D. L., Goebel, T., Davis, L. G., O’Grady, P., Stueber, D., Pratt, J. E., & Smith, H. L.
2020
The Western Stemmed Tradition: Problems and Prospects in Paleoindian Archaeology in the Intermountain West, PaleoAmerica, 6:1, 23-42, https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2019.1653153.
Duke, D.
2015
Haskett Spear Weaponry and Protein-Residue Evidence of Proboscidean Hunting in the Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah, PaleoAmerica, 1:1, 109-112, https://doi.org/10.1179/2055556314Z.0000000002.
Duke, D., & King, J.
2014
A GIS model for predicting wetland habitat in the Great Basin at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and implications for Paleoindian archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Science, 49, 276-291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.05.012
Duke, D.
2013
The Exploded Fine-Grained Volcanic Sources of the Desert West and the Primacy of Tool Function in Material Selection. North American Archaeologist, 34(4), 323–354. https://doi.org/10.2190/NA.34.4.c