All Categories - PACIFIC NORTHWEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Where were all the Villages? Applying Geophysical Prospection to Understand Long-term Household and Community Dynamics in the Salish Sea

2/10/2020

Taking the samples from a long house depression on Galiano Island, Gulf Islands, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Where were all the Villages? Applying Geophysical Prospection to Understand Long-term Household and Community Dynamics in the Salish Sea
By
Dr. Colin Grier, Department of Anthropology,
W.S.U. Vancouver

Despite decades of archaeological survey, CRM work, and targeted excavation inside houses, the sample of documented precontact Salishan house and village plans — and even simply village locations — remains surprisingly limited. As a result, many questions about household and village dynamics over the short and long term remain difficult to address. I outline how geophysics and archaeological ground-truthing can be productively applied to this problem, illustrated primarily by recent and ongoing research in the southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia. I also lay out some long-standing and emerging hypotheses concerning household and village organization, and how addressing these can serve the goal of restorative justice and reconciliation for Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

As highly perishable wooden constructions, plankhouses appear in the archaeological record of the Northwest Coast primarily through their footprint – as house terraces, platforms and depressions. Few of these house features have been preserved given modern coastal development, but the Dionisio Point site (DgRv-003) on Galiano Island provides an important example of the extent of terraforming that occurred to produce large houses and villages.

At Dionisio Point, at least ﬁve house features were established around 1500 years ago on three terraces that were cut into a sloping hillside. These three terraces measure approximately 60 x 20 m. The middle terrace contained a plankhouse estimated at 40 x 10 m in size, and the upper and lower terraces contain two houses each that measured approximately 20 x 10 m. The houses were laid out in a systematic and regular fashion suggesting an overall plan to the village, and radiocarbon dates indicate contemporaneity of the ﬁve known houses. Houses on the terraces are surrounded by 1 to 3 m high earthen ridges, adding to the engineered design of the village location. Terraforming at Dionisio Point illustrates an impressive and substantial eﬀort to clear trees, excavate terraces, move earth and construct massive plankhouses.

DATE: Friday, February 21st, 2020

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2019 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Basketry from the Ozette Village Archaeological Site: A book signing and cake on the just released edition!

11/11/2019

A book signing and cake on the just released edition of:
Basketry from the Ozette Village Archaeological Site
By
Dr. Dale R. Croes, W.S.U. and PNWAS Director

From the Editor, Dr. Darby Stapp:

When Dale Croes asked us to consider publishing Basketry from the Ozette Village Archaeological Site: A Technological, Functional, and Comparative Study, the decision was easy. Written 50 years ago to fulfill the dissertation requirement for Dale’s Ph.D. at Washington State University, it was scheduled to be published as Volume IV of the Ozette Archaeological Project Research Reports. But, for various reasons it never did appear, and the basketry information from this important site remained largely inaccessible.

Remarkably, however, for the past 50 years, Dale has continued researching Northwest basketry, building on the incredible dataset that launched his career by excavating and analyzing basketry from wet sites across the Pacific Northwest. The vision he described to us was a document that would keep the integrity of the original dissertation intact, but supplemented with new information—in the form of footnotes—from more than a dozen major wet site excavations conducted in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. A little awkward perhaps (is there another document in existence with 268 footnotes, 232 figures, 43 tables, and 25 maps?), but in terms of anthropological value, a treasure.

How fortunate are the tribal and archaeological communities to have a major synthesis of Northwest basketry written by one of the few people on earth who could produce such a synthesis. When it comes to anthropological value, it doesn’t get much better than that, so our reply to Dale was an emphatic, “Yes, we would be honored to publish Volume IV of the Ozette Archaeological Project Research Reports.”

DATE: Friday, December 20th, 2019

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2019 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Aypax-kan-ishchit—The Yakama-Cowlitz Trail: History, Archaeology, and an Approach to Evaluation

10/4/2019

Aypax-kan-ishchit—The Yakama-Cowlitz Trail:
History, Archaeology, and an Approach to Evaluation

By Rick McClure,
Retired U.S. Forest Service Archaeologist

Cross-mountain footpaths were primary avenues for exchange and social interaction between Indigenous people east and west of the Cascade Mountains in pre-contact and historic times. The Aypax-kan-ishchit, or “Yakama Trail,” ranked among the principal routes in the southern Washington Cascades, connecting Taytnapam settlements in the Cowlitz River watershed with Yakama settlements to the east.

Ray Paolella, of the William O. Douglas Trail Foundation, on a section of abandoned trail near Packwood, Wa. in the upper Cowlitz River watershed.

A group of private, non-profit, tribal, and federal partners initiated efforts in 2018 to begin comprehensive mapping and documentation of the Yakama Trail, while developing a cultural/historical context for National Register evaluation and a strategy for assessing the integrity of the resource. This presentation summarizes research completed to date and addresses potential challenges for nomination and listing.
Approximately 140 miles in length, the trail originally extended from Cowlitz Prairie on the west, near present-day Toledo, Washington, to the mouth of the Naches River, near present-day Yakima, Washington, and crossed the Cascades at Cowlitz Pass.

DATE: Friday, October 18th, 2019

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2019 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Holocene Geochronology and Archaeology at Cascade Pass, Northern Cascade Range, WA

4/21/2019

Holocene Geochronology and Archaeology at Cascade Pass, Northern Cascade Range, WA

By Robert R. Mierendorf, National Park Service
and Franklin F. Foit, Jr., WSU

Indigenous uses of Cascade Pass began by about 9,600 years ago and continues through the present. Cascade Pass is one of many on the northern Cascade Range divide that separates east-flowing from west-flowing rivers (to the Columbia River and Salish Sea, respectively). In the Lushootseed language of Skagit people, Cascade Pass is ᶎʔlu’s which translates as “over the mountain”. Cascade Pass’ traditional importance is further recorded in ethnographic and historic accounts of Salish elders from villages on both sides of the range (Northwest Coast and Plateau culture areas). It became one of the first trans-Cascade routes explored in the contact period and later the area attracted prospectors, photographers, road planners, hikers and campers, and climbers.

In response to overuse from the burgeoning popularity of camping in the Pass meadows, the eroded soils of the early 1970s have been largely returned to native meadow plants. Beginning in 2005, Park archaeologists conducted limited excavations to gather baseline data and determine the significance of the archaeological remains recorded in 1977 as archaeological site 45CH221.

This presentation describes the technical results of the excavations and more generally, the way these contribute to understanding how the site formed (site formation processes) and its state of preservation (taphonomy), how it was used for over nine millennia, and what this new data means in light of current understandings of Pacific Northwest peoples’ traditional occupation of alpine areas in the larger region, and to broader research and conservation issues.

DATE: Friday, May 17th, 2019

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2019 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Lost Asian Treasure: The Manila Galleon Wrecks of North America

2/6/2019

Scott Williams holds a piece of beeswax that washed up on the Oregon Coast from the Beeswax Shipwreck.

Lost Asian Treasure: The Manila Galleon Wrecks of North America

By Scott S. Williams, Cultural Resources Program Manager, WSDOT

For 250 years, Spanish galleons plied the north Pacific taking the luxury goods of Asia to the European markets of New Spain in Mexico and South America. It was the longest and most arduous ocean trade route in the world, and each year only one or two ships made the voyage.

Many of these galleons were wrecked in the storms and on the reefs of the western Pacific in the treacherous waters around the Philippines, the Marianas, and Japan, but three came to rest on the west coast of North America. Scott Williams will discuss the history of the trade and the 12-year effort to locate the remains of one of these galleons, known as the Beeswax Wreck, in Oregon.

Based on extensive archaeological, geological, and archival investigations, the wreck has been identified as the Santo Cristo de Burgos, which left Manila in 1693. At least some of her crew survived and lived with the Nehalem Indians on the Oregon coast for a time, becoming the first Europeans that Northwest Coast peoples interacted with.

RECENT ARTICLES ABOUT THE BEESWAX WRECK:
HAKAI MAGAZINE: Coastal Job: Maritime Archaeologist
CROSSCUT: 326-year-old beeswax is washing up on Oregon beaches

DATE: Friday, March 1st, 2019

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2019 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Archaeology of the Kuril Islands, Russian Northwest Pacific

11/18/2018

Dr. Ben Fitzhugh and crew excavating a Kuril Island sites .

Archaeology of the Kuril Islands, Russian Northwest Pacific
By Dr. Ben Fitzhugh, Professor,
U.W., and Director, Quaternary Research Center at U.W.

The Kuril Islands stretch from northern Japan to the Kamchatka Peninsula, over 1000 km of volcanic peaks piercing the remote Northwest Pacific Ocean and serving as gateway to the Sea of Okhotsk and Russian Far East. Like their cousins, the Aleutian Islands, most of the Kurils are hard to get to and devoid of human settlements ... today!

Our interdisciplinary research in the Kurils provides a portrait of changing Kuril settlement history that can be compared to that of maritime cultures around the North Pacific Rim, including those of the coasts of the Pacific Northwest. While North Pacific cultures from Japan to Oregon share many similarities in subsistence and lifestyle, the differences are also instructive. I will finish with some thoughts on how these comparisons may be relevant to issues of contemporary resource management and cultural resilience.

DATE: Friday, December 7th , 2018

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2019 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

The Beginnings of State-based Paleoamerican archaeology in Washington: Milestone events and finds in the Southern Plateau that have Transformed our Knowledge and the Practice of Northwest Archaeology since then.

9/26/2018

Lind Coulee Site bison horns/skull excavations

The Beginnings of State-based Paleoamerican archaeology in Washington: Milestone events and finds in the Southern Plateau that have Transformed our Knowledge and the Practice of Northwest Archaeology since then.

By Dr. David G. Rice,
Plateau Archaeologist

This public program is intended to emphasize the dynamic nature of the archaeology discipline, and both of its scientific and humanistic aspects, in the search for the earliest Americans. The main theme is to look at the start of the search for PaleoAmerican sites at State and local levels, and to identify key milestone events that have balanced these aspects over the past 70 years.

DATE: Friday, October 12th , 2018

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2018 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Coming Out/Book Signing of Ed Carriere and Dale Croes’ Re-Awakening Ancient Salish Sea Basketry book

2/25/2018

Coming Out/Book Signing of Ed Carriere and Dale Croes’ Re-Awakening Ancient Salish Sea Basketry book
And their Recent trip to work with Maori Weavers in New Zealand and presentation at a Wetland Archaeology Conference in France

By Ed Carriere, Suquamish Elder
and
Dale Croes, Wet Site Archaeologist, W.S.U. and Director of PNWAS

It has finally happened, the three year project that we have presented annually at PNWAS is now being published into a book that we want to share with you at this PNWAS book coming out/signing party. We also want to share too our recent trips to present our work to New Zealand Maori at their National Weavers Gathering and to a Wetland Archaeology Conference in France. Use the enclosed PNWAS discount form to order the book as a current member of PNWAS. If you are not current, send in the enclosed membership form as you order your book through the Journal of Northwest Anthropology. Sure look forward to sharing the book with you covering this experimental archaeological work we call Generationally-Linked Archaeology. We will have a cake to cut and celebrate together. Thank you for your support and involvement with Ed’s and my efforts to promote culture and archaeology through the past years.

DATE: Friday, April 13th, 2018

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2018 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Eagle Gorge Terrace: An Upland Hunting Camp and its Place in the Economic Lives of the Precontact Puget Salish

12/13/2017

Examples of retouched lithic tools from Eagle Gorge Terrace (a-r) and Tualdad Altu (aa-rr),
showing the strong morphological similarities between tools of the same functional type.

Eagle Gorge Terrace: An Upland Hunting Camp and its Place in the Economic Lives of the Precontact Puget Salish

By Dr. James C. Chatters
Applied Paleoscience

Outside of the lowland rivers and saltwater margins of the Salish Sea, field camps of the Northwest Coast’s logistically organized foragers are extremely rare. Chronologically delimited occupations with faunal remains are even more so.

The Eagle Gorge Terrace site (45-KI-1083), located along the Green River in the foothills of the Cascade Range, is one such site—a hunting camp containing a specialized tool kit and a large collection of calcined (burnt) faunal remains dating to the sixth or seventh century AD. Analysis of this assemblage and comparison with the approximately contemporary nearby village of Tualdad Altu (45-KI-59) demonstrates that upland hunters used a discrete subset of their culture’s technology in a highly focused effort to process meat and hides from some of the region’s largest land mammals.

DATE: Friday, February 9th, 2018

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to non-members, $5.00 for Students (please renew membership for 2018 and these programs at http://www.pnwas.org and now through PayPal)
Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

Berkeley Rockshelter Site: Understanding the Late Holocene use of the Mount Rainier Area

10/25/2017

Berkeley Rockshelter Site:
Understanding the Late Holocene use of the
Mount Rainier Area

By Dr. Bradford W. Andrews
Pacific Lutheran University
and
Greg Burtchard
Retired Mt. Rainier National Park Archaeologist

Expanding on the recent Journal of Northwest Anthropology JONA 2016 article Berkeley Rockshelter Lithics, Understanding the Late Holocene Use of the Mount Rainier Area, this illustrated presentation will address two topics:

What is currently known about the prehistoric use of Mount Rainier area, and
What is the nature of activities that took place at the late Holocene Berkeley Rockshelter site situated at 5,600 feet on the northern flank of the mountain.

Greg Burtchard, who recently retired after 16 years as the Mount Rainier National Park archaeologist, will present his model for understanding long-term subsistence and settlement processes as they apply to Mount Rainier.
Working with forager-collector principles first developed by Lewis Binford (1980), and modified by Randall Schalk and Greg Cleveland (1983) to model temporal change in the Pacific Northwest, Burtchard considers the mountain’s basic environmental characteristics and its capacity to attract and sustain pre-contact hunters and gatherers.

As part of recent research in the Park, data recovered during test excavations at Berkeley Rockshelter, occupied from about 2,500 B.P. to contact, have been analyzed by Bradford Andrews, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pacific Lutheran University and some of his students. Debitage and projectile points found at the rockshelter support the inference that late-stage flaking, for shaping and reworking projectile points and preforms, was a prominent activity at the site.
Andrews will summarize the results of this analysis, which supports the interpretation that it functioned primarily as a limited-task field or hunting camp, consistent with the late Holocene use of Mount Rainier as proposed in Burtchard’s model.

DATE: Friday, December 1st, 2017

TIME: 7 pm to 9 pm

PLACE: Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, 7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 in the Cascade Room

COST: FREE to members, $10.00 to Non-members, $5.00 for Students, Seniors and Mountaineers members (please renew membership for 2018 and these programs at http://pnwas.org and now through PayPal)

Refreshments provided (Please bring cookies/snacks to share with the beverages).

PNWAS MEMBERSHIP 2018