North America - NW Coast/Alaska (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (301 Records)
Archaeologists have referenced the oral record throughout the history of their research in Tsimshian territory. In this paper we frame our recent collaboration against this legacy and argue that that a symmetrical relationship is a necessary foundation for any conjunction between these complex datasets. Our collaboration recognizes the common history they represent, but also their different logical frameworks and empirical scope. In our context, the oral record was more complete, detailed, and...
Changing Ecologies and Altered Landscapes: A 13,500 year Paleoecological Record from Galiano Island, British Columbia (2017)
A high-resolution lake sediment core recovered from Shaw’s Bog on Galiano Island provides a window into the paleoecology of the island and region back to the Late Pleistocene. The extensive time depth represented offers an opportunity to evaluate ecology and climate prior to the known arrival of people in the southern Gulf Islands. It also provides a mechanism to measure impacts on the local ecology following the establishment of major, long-term village locations such as Dionisio Point and...
Changing House Forms on the Northwest Coast of North America (2015)
Traditionally, Northwest Coast houses were rectangular, post and beam dwellings. Architectural details varied regionally, ethnically and even locally. It is presently impossible to trace this variation archaeologically beyond a few coarse-grained statements. The earliest structures date to at least ca. 5000 calBP; they are rectilinear and some at least are semisubterranean. The longest continuous sequence of houses is presently documented in the Prince Rupert Harbor region of northern British...
Chronometry at Bear Creek, a ~12,000 Year-Old Site in Western Washington (2017)
Extant deposits at the Bear Creek site are highly compositionally variable, including fibrous peat, fluvial sands, volcanic tephra, and diatomaceous earth, reflecting a series of significant Holocene changes to the local environment. Multiple methods were used to directly date each of these sediments, including radiocarbon dating, single-grain IRSL dating of feldspar, OSL dating of fine-grained quartz, and tephra dating. Results from independent chronometric methods were then integrated with...
Clam Gardens: Ancient and Living Landscapes in the Salish Sea (2017)
Clam gardens are rock-walled, intertidal terraces constructed by the coastal First Nations of British Columbia (Canada) and Native Americans of Washington State and Alaska (USA) to enhance the shellfish productivity of beaches and rocky shorelines. This presentation highlights recent work in the Salish Sea by members and partners of the "Clam Garden Network", a community of First Nations, academics, researchers, and resource managers interested in the cultural and ecological importance of clam...
Coastal Predictive Modelling for Early Period Archaeological Sites in a Landscape subject to Rapidly Changing Sea Levels, Quadra Island, British Columbia (2017)
In the Northwest Coast, paleoenvironmental context is essential in the search for late Pleistocene–early Holocene coastal archaeological sites. The dynamic and complex relative sea level history is a key determinant in site discovery. In this presentation I describe how we are using predictive modelling to help overcome the challenges of this dynamic history. This research introduces novel coast-focussed variables and methodology to find early period coastal archaeological sites on Quadra...
Coastal Settlement Patterns in BC at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (2017)
In this presentation we explore how early Holocene shoreline settlement patterns in Haida Gwaii can be used to inform the search for late Pleistocene sites on Quadra Island in the northern Salish Sea. The 11K to 14.5K cal BP shorelines on Quadra Island are located at elevations up to 180 m above modern. Low visibility necessitates focused investigations on these raised landforms in order to find early sites. We are applying our knowledge of the distribution of archaeological sites in Gwaii...
Collaboration Continues: Revisiting Archaeology between CRM Archaeologists and First Nations Communities in the Pacific Northwest (2017)
First Nation’s heritage concerns are at the forefront of many large-scale and controversial development projects across the province of British Columbia. How developers and Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Archaeologists choose to address these concerns can significantly impact working and political relationships. CRM archaeologists are on the front lines balancing and navigating complex, and sensitive socio-political heritage issues. Our small CRM company, Kleanza Consulting Ltd. (Kleanza),...
Colonization of Northern North America: a view from Eastern Beringia (2016)
Recent investigations at multiple well-stratified multi-component sites in interior Eastern Beringia have provided important data on late Pleistocene technology, subsistence economy, and habitat use. Our review incorporates recent multidisciplinary work at Upward Sun River, Mead, and Swan Point. We summarize these data within human ecological perspectives and derive implications for the lifeways of early Beringians. We review the biogeography and early archaeological record for the Ice Free...
Community archaeology on the south west coast of Alaska:TAPP (2016)
The Togiak archaeology and Paleo archaeology project is a combined effort between the Togiak community and the University of Montana to renegotiate the pre-colonial and historic understanding of the Old Togiak site in Southwest Alaska. Preliminary results from the first field season challenge our current understanding of the site incorporating community driven research and knowledge. This paper serves to expand our knowledge and understanding of the region in propose a new baseline in...
Comparison of Radiometric Dating Techniques: Pacific Northwest (2015)
Radiometric dating is problematic in non-midden sites of the Pacific Northwest. Charcoal is ubiquitous in the forest soils and unburned bone readily dissolves. This fact impedes development of a regional chronologies and understanding of the process of resource intensification that was so important to development of Northwest cultures. To alleviate this deviciency, DirectAMS and Central Washington University undertook research to demonstrate the validity of alternatives to traditional...
Conceptual Frameworks for Nuu-chah-nulth Whaling (2017)
The Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) of Canada’s west coast are renown ethnographically for their cultural practice of open ocean whaling. Research in the last decade has shed light on the preferred species, the ecological reasons why whales were pursued, the antiquity of whaling, and the economic and social implications of whaling. Most of this research has been substantive and methodological in nature with only modest attention to theoretical issues. In this paper, I take a Human Behavioral Ecology...
Connecting Communities to Place: Public Archaeology at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (2015)
The National Park Service (NPS) pursues multiple opportunities to partner with community organizations and engage the public in our ongoing archaeological and historical research program at Fort Vancouver in southwest Washington. Our focus is to increase our understanding of the people who lived at this multicomponent historical archaeological site. The park forms a large portion of the Vancouver National Historic Reserve, which is significant for its role as the headquarters for Hudson’s Bay...
Conservation Biology and Archaeology: Using faunal remains of Pacific cod from the Tse-whit-zen village (2015)
In 2010, the Salish Sea stock of Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) was listed as a species of concern, which resulted from declining commercial and recreational catches that have not increased despite harvest reductions. Fishery managers typically use historical data from the past 40 to 50 years to create baselines to manage reduced fisheries; archaeological data can extend these baselines much further back in time. The Tse-whit-zen village site, located on the southern shore of the Strait of...
Cooperation, Labor, Sharing, and Inequality in a Long-Lived Household, Bridge River Site, British Columbia (2016)
Archaeological research at the Bridge River site, British Columbia, demonstrates that during the Bridge River 3 period (ca. 1300-1000 cal. B.P.) material wealth-based inequality developed on an inter-household basis during what appears to have been a Malthusian ceiling where populations were briefly very high and resource access weakened. While there is significant knowledge of village-wide socio-economic, demographic and political change at the site little work has been done to gain an...
Creative Mitigation: Archaeological Site Monitoring on Military Lands in Central Alaska (2015)
The creation of a large live-fire training range in the Donnelly Training Area (DTA) of United States Army Garrison, Fort Wainwright (USAG FWA), required Army archaeologists to integrate standard mitigation techniques with a creative new approach. Extensive survey of the entire Battle Area Complex (BAX) target area and the surface danger zone (SDZ) downrange of targets uncovered over 150 archaeology sites. Twenty-nine sites in the target area were excavated and USAG FWA and the Alaska State...
Credibility Enhancing Displays and the Changing Expression of Coast Salish Social Commitments (2016)
Recent developments in evolutionary psychology expanding on signalling theory provide key insights to the connections between expressing social commitments and resource rights. Credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) are a means to convince individuals of commitment to belief systems and can link costly acts or extravagant displays to social success. In the Salish Sea the transition from labrets to cranial modification from 3200-1000 BP has often been framed in terms reflecting a shift from...
Cultural Forests in Cross Section: The Exposure and Destruction of CMT Chronologies on Vancouver Island’s West Coast. (2017)
Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) bearing the scars of First Nation’s resource use are ubiquitous in British Columbia’s old growth forests, yet remain one of the most endangered archaeological site types due to industrial logging. The majority of CMTs are bark strip features with precise spatial, temporal, and harvesting pattern data that, when viewed on a landscape level, have great informative value related to forest use. However, CMT use in archaeological studies has been infrequent, small...
Cultural Forests of the southern Nuu-chah-nulth: Indigenous bark tending on Vancouver Island (2016)
Culturally Modified Trees are British Columbia Canada's most common archaeological site type. Data related to these indigenous forest management sites have been collected for a few decades now through CRM work in the area, though little research has encorporated this archive. My MA thesis focuses on creating regional chronologies of bark stripping and logging dates for the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, to better understand forest usage and population dynamics around the contact period. In...
Culturally Modified Trees of the Pacific Northwest: How do we define what is protected and not protected under the HCA in British Columbia. (2016)
In British Columbia, archaeologists are challenged with the task of identifying and recording Culturally Modified Trees (or CMTs) with some live trees dating back to the early seventeenth century. How these features are recorded as archaeological sites, are guided and managed by the BC Archaeology Branch under the Heritage Conservation Act (HCA). This provincial ministry is constantly changing departments, and sometimes change how they would like archaeologists to inventory and manage CMTs. Up...
Dam It! Manipulating Water in the Tolovana Mining District, Alaska (2016)
Obtaining adequate water for mining operations has always been a problem in Livengood, Alaska. To make mining feasible on small creeks in the area, ditches were excavated from the earliest days of the strike in 1915. As the character of mining evolved throughout the first half of the 20th century, corporate interests formed to create even larger water conveyance systems, most notably the Hess Creek Dam, a sizable earthen dam built on permafrost. This poster presents an overview of the water...
Database development and GIS analysis at Tse-whit-zen (2015)
Digital databases promote consistency and data quality, facilitate analysis of patterning at multiple temporal and spatial scales and promote accessibility to a wide range of potential users. The value of digital databases is especially clear with large complex projects that involve collaborators working in separate research settings with different collections, but where data integration is essential to meeting project goals, such as with the Tse-whit-zen project. This presentation reviews...
Dating Pacific Period Settlement Pattern Dynamics in the Prince Rupert Harbor Region of Northern British Columbia. (2015)
A large regional suite of radiocarbon dates documents changing Pacific Period settlement patterns in the Prince Rupert Harbor region of northern British Columbia. Late Pleistocene/Holocene sea level changes focuses discussion on the last 5000 years. At that time, the settlement pattern appears to be one of small, one to four house communities dispersed across the sea-scape. Non-residential middens are present throughout the Holocene. Larger linear villages appear after 5000 calBP and larger...
Depositional Practice and Ancestral Presence at Edye Point (2015)
On the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, between 400–1500 calA.D., the Straits Salish peoples built distinctive funerary petroforms for their ancestral dead. These above ground features, constructed in a patterned array of sizes and shapes, were the material and spatial outcome of ritualized depositional practices. The Edye Point Cemetery, the largest funerary petroform cemetery in the region, has more than 300 of these features concentrated in a three hectare area. There is a recursive and...
Developing a "good" website for the Tse-whit-zen Project (2015)
Websites have become a relatively common way to share findings from archaeological research with the public. They are easily adaptable, can reach a wide audience (e.g. location, age, education levels), and can supplement other outreach programs. What makes a "good" one? Answering this requires that one has established goals; and that one has developed ways to assess whether the goals have been met. In our background research, explicit goal-setting and assessment of archaeological-based...