Daron is a Far Western Principal and Director of our Desert Branch in Henderson, Nevada. He also serves as Far Western’s Chief Operating Officer. Daron has worked in the Great Basin and California for 25 years, and his CRM experience encompasses diverse regulatory settings and industry sectors. Recent projects include survey, excavation, and sensitivity modeling on lands managed by the BLM, USFS, and U.S. military. He has a strong background with the energy sector, where he has directed solar, transmission line, and pipeline projects for NV Energy, Southern California Edison, and PG&E. Daron has also worked with Native American tribes, including both archaeological and ethnographic efforts, and he has experience with indirect effects assessment. He is permitted by the BLM as a Principal Investigator in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah.
Daron is an active researcher, and clients benefit from his scientific expertise when faced with evolving standards in cultural resource evaluation. His interests lie in hunter-gatherer ecology and lithic economy. Specializing in flaked stone analysis, he has directed large-scale studies on lithic resource use, X-ray fluorescence sourcing, and obsidian hydration dating. Daron actively publishes his findings, with works in Journal of Archaeological Science, PaleoAmerica, American Antiquity, North American Archaeologist, and University of Utah Press. Daron’s efforts also involve public outreach such as the Obsidian Hydration Dating Workbook and A Point in Time, which was developed as part of Far Western’s work with the Nevada BLM’s Lincoln County Archaeological Initiative.
You can follow Daron’s research online at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daron_Duke
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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
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Daron’s Featured Publications
Duke, Daron
2015
Haskett Spear Weaponry and Protein-Residue Evidence of Proboscidean Hunting in the Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah. PaleoAmerica 1(1):109-112
Duke, Daron, and Jerome H. King
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.
Duke, Daron
2013
The Exploded Fine-Grained Volcanic Sources of the Desert West and the Primacy of Tool Function in Material Selection. In George H. Odell Memorial Issue, North American Archaeologist 34(4):323-354.
Access Daron’s publications at academia.edu.