North America - NW Coast/Alaska (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (301 Records)
This paper will begin examining the historical context for the development of archaeological repositories in BC, and the changing role they have played. Commercial archaeologists have, of late, regarded repositories in British Columbia as an afterthought, though this was not always the case. A review of the original stakeholders, and goals of archaeological bodies in BC's past will shed light on where we find ourselves and where we should be headed. The second half of the paper will examine...
An Archaeological Test of A Settlement Pattern Shift Recorded in Tsimshian Oral Records (2017)
We archaeologically test a hypothesis derived from the Tsimshian oral record. That record recites a long history of settlement movement and conflict culminating in an invasion of coastal Tsimshian territory by northerners. This conflict reportedly caused the Tsimshian to temporarily abandon their coastal territories and retreat inland. We tracked settlement shifts through a site taxonomy and intensive analysis of a large 14C sample acquired by percussion coring. We found an occupational hiatus...
The archaeology of dogs at the precontact Yup’ik site of Nunalleq, Western Alaska (2017)
Historically and ethnographically dogs have played a prominent role in the lifeways and lifeworlds of many Arctic and sub-Arctic peoples, and are considered to be a vital aspect of adaptation to living in these regions, providing protection, fur and meat, as well as aiding hunting and transportation. Excavations at the precontact site of Nunalleq in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in coastal Western Alaska have uncovered a significant proportion of dog bones amongst the faunal assemblage. The presence...
The Archaeology of First Generation Japanese American Men at an Idaho WWII Internment Camp (2015)
Amidst wartime xenophobia, the United States government unjustly imprisoned over 120,100 individuals of Japanese heritage during World War II. Despite being housed in dreary, tar-papered military barracks at sites that ranged from former racetracks to prisons, Japanese internees transformed their inhospitable living conditions into places that embodied some semblance of home and Japanese culture. These transformations were material in nature; internees creatively modified and consumed...
Archaeology of the Shaw Creek Catchment, Central Alaska. (2015)
Research begun in the 1990s focused within a small valley system, Shaw Creek Catchment (SCC), within the middle Tanana valley. Investigations show that long-term habitation and resource exploitation began about 14,200 cal.BP at Swan Point, the oldest site in Alaska. Both Swan Point and Mead date to the terminal Pleistocene. Together they constitute key sites for interior Alaska archaeology with their distinct multi-component records illustrating changes in environment, technology, fauna, and...
Archaeology of the Terminal Pleistocene McDonald Creek Site, Central Alaska (2015)
In 2014 archaeologists from Texas A&M University and Colorado State University began a long-term excavation of the McDonald Creek site (FAI-2043), located in the Tanana valley of central Alaska. In this paper we present our initial results. At least two terminal Pleistocene cultural components with preserved living floors, lithic artifacts, faunal and floral remains have been unearthed, respectively dating to about 14,000 and 12,600 cal BP. At the end of the 2014 field season, a probe unearthed...
Assessing Response of Tse-whit-zen's Large-bodied Fish to Environmental Change using Sampling to Redundancy (2017)
Tse-whitzen is one of the largest village excavations on the Northwest Coast; more than 1,400 features were documented and an estimated 234,563 fish bones were recovered from ¼" mesh alone. While research potential is great, the challenge of sampling such a huge assemblage is daunting. Previous research has focused on the >1/8" mesh matrix from "C" buckets, which emphasizes small-bodied fishes. To track changing representation of large-bodied fish through time and space, we devised a method of...
Avian Skeletal Part Representation at 49-KIS-050 (2016)
Zooarchaeological avifauna analyses demonstrate that wing elements tend to be overrepresented in archaeological assemblages from diverse temporal and cultural contexts. There have been several explanations for this phenomenon including bone density, differential transport and more recently, Bovy’s social zooarchaeological interpretations for the overall overabundance of wing elements, as well as specifically of distal wing elements in the Watmough Bay assemblage. The avifaunal assemblage...
Bear Creek (45KI839) Data Recovery Investigation and the Paleoarchaic Settlement of the South Salish Sea during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (2017)
The Bear Creek site (45KI839) in Washington State’s central Puget lowland is among the earliest lithic artifact-bearing, professionally excavated archaeological sites on the Pacific coast between Haida Gwaii and the Santa Barbara Channel. Data recovery excavations in 2013 provided an unprecedented view of Native American settlement in a rapidly changing coastal lowland setting during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene (LPH) transition. We summarize the results of these excavations and attendant...
Bear Creek and the Pacific Northwest Western Stemmed Tradition (2017)
The lithic assemblage from Bear Creek (45KI839), a late Pleistocene-early Holocene site in King County, Washington, is representative of the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST), likely the oldest lithic tradition in most areas west of the Rocky Mountains. It is followed in the Pacific Northwest by the Olcott Tradition. Although some argue that Olcott represents an intrusion from Alaska, archaeological evidence supports in situ development from the WST. In the Great Basin the WST is biface oriented,...
Beetle, lice and flea sub-fossils as evidence for resource exploitation, the use of space and ecological conditions at the pre-contact Eskimo site of Nunalleq, south-western Alaska (2015)
Samples collected from the permafrost-preserved floors of 14-17th century Eskimo winter sod houses at Nunalleq, south-western Alaska, have yielded thousands of insect sub-fossils. These diverse and exceptionally well-preserved insects are invaluable indicators of the ecological conditions which prevailed inside the structures, but also of the activities that took place inside them. Indeed, while external parasites such as human lice, bird fleas and dog lice reveal details about hygienic...
Beyond House Floors: The Logistics of Northwest Coast Plank-house Villages (2017)
Household archaeology has a long and fruitful history in Northwest Coast archaeology. Excavation at numerous sites has provided detailed data on living surfaces and activity areas, but the greater dynamics of household and village organization remain elusive. This paper looks at important, but neglected functional constraints of plank-house villages, namely the need for firewood, potable water, and disposal of waste. These factors, which almost certainly informed on the construction and...
Beyond Radiocarbon: Using AMS Samples to Assess Woody Plant Use at Tse-whit-zen (2017)
Paleoethnobotany, while not a nascent field, is still an underutilized research framework in Pacific Northwest (PNW) archaeology. But increasingly, PNW projects have incorporated macrobotanical analyses as a precursor to radiocarbon dating. Analysts provide taxonomic identifications of woody fuel remains and assist in selecting fragments from short-lived genera that will mitigate the old wood effect, thereby increasing the accuracy of dates. This paper assesses the utility of an anthracological...
Beyond the Four-Letter Word: Heritage Management and Public Archaeology at Fort Vancouver (2015)
Heritage managers of complex archaeological sites are more highly successful when there is a commitment to on-going public involvement and the integration of multiple communities in the site’s archaeological research and site interpretation. The public archaeology program at Fort Vancouver is highlighted as a model for integrating traditional archaeology education activities with site-specific archaeological research, the development of archaeology-influenced interpretation, and the development...
Biographies of Northwest Coast Copper: A material investigation (2017)
This paper explores indigenous use of copper metal on the Northwest Coast of North America, and the impact of colonial contact on established cultural practices. Prior to contact (late 17th to early 19th century), native copper was collected, traded, and manipulated by indigenous communities that considered the material animate and powerful. Following the introduction of foreign trade materials, copper continued to be used to create culturally significant artifacts, however, strict frameworks of...
Birds of a Feather? Bird Conservation and Archaeology in the Gulf of Alaska (2017)
Gulf of Alaska islands provide habitat for substantial populations of both seabirds and migratory waterfowl, which have been under threat from mammal introductions and landscape degradation for more than 200 years. Bird management drives decisions in this island region and focuses on the eradication of invasive species and restoration of island landscapes to their "natural" state. However, given that people and climate have influenced these landscapes for thousands of years, we ask: how do we...
Bone Carbonate Derived Stable Isotope Data and Aleut Diet Change (2015)
In this poster, we build on an earlier study by using stable isotope data extracted from bone carbonate to evaluate the hypothesis that two behaviorally distinct groups of people, Paleo- and Neo-Aleut, occupied the eastern Aleutians after 1000 BP. This study focuses on directly dated burial assemblages from Chaluka midden, Ship Rock Island and Kagamil Island. We use the SISUS linear mixing model informed by isotopic data from Aleut faunal assemblages to address temporal and spatial variation in...
Borrowing and Inheritance: Testing Cultural Transmission Hypotheses in the Bridge River Housepit Village (2017)
Cultural transmission is an evolutionary process that involves the transfer of information between people that over time can lead to the establishment of cultural traditions. This approach permits development of hypotheses regarding the cultural evolutionary process in a variety of contexts. In this paper we examine cultural transmission between generations by analyzing the effects of vertical and horizontal inheritance using archaeological data from the Bridge River housepit village. The Bridge...
Buried Archaeological Sensitivity Modeling in the Pacific Northwest (2017)
ICF assisted the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) with the preparation of a buried archaeological sensitivity model in support of a client-sponsored research project in Seattle, Washington. ICF approached the model development from a statewide scale and employed geologic landform type and soil age as main model inputs. Surface geology data was not available at a large enough scale to support the entire effort so ICF combined national resource conservation soil data...
Burned Earth Without Cooking Stones- Cultural or Natural? Feature Deposition, Ethnobotany, and Analysis in Upland Puget Sound, Western Washington (2017)
Concentrations of burned earth, cooking stones, a shallow basin profile, and sometimes faunal remains are often associated with Puget Sound hearth features which were commonly used for open-air cooking. Discrete areas of burned earth lacking concentrations of cooking stones have not received as much cultural feature recognition or interpretation. This poster explores the function of one in situ concentration of charcoal adjacent to a dense area of cooking stones at an upland camp in the Puget...
The caribou didn't come back: Modelling human migration variations through local ecological changes (2015)
The objective of this paper is to model the effect that the presence/absence of specific ecological variables has on the passive movement of raw materials from their point of origin to their point of deposition in the archaeological record. This study takes place in the Talkeetna Mountains of Southcentral Alaska. The model was built using ArcGIS, informed through ethnographic, historic, and modern ecological and archaeological data, and structured using a theoretical framework from Human...
Caught Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Using Optical Dating to Date Ancient Clam gardens on the Pacific Northwest (2017)
Rock-walled archaeological features are notoriously hard to date, largely because of the absence of organic material for radiocarbon dating. This study demonstrates the efficacy of dating clam garden walls using optical dating, and uses optical ages to determine how sedimentation rates in the intertidal zone are affected by their construction. Clam gardens are rock-walled, intertidal terraces that were constructed and maintained by coastal First Nation peoples to increase bivalve habitat and...
Celebrating Partnerships and Investigating Historical Cultural Diversity in the Pacific Northwest Region of the US Forest Service (2016)
The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region of the US Forest Service has engaged partners and volunteers from diverse groups for over four decades: Friends groups to restore lookouts and log cabins; Passport In Time projects to engage the public in archaeological site testing; and universities, museums and independent researchers to investigate and interpret a wide variety of sites. We collaborate closely with the Native American tribes to preserve and protect their heritage and places of cultural and...
Centralized Households and Decentralized Communities: Economic Integration in a Marpole Period Plankhouse Village (2017)
The Marpole Period (2500 to 1000 BP) was a time of social transformation in the Salish Sea region of the Northwest Coast of North America. During this period, social and economic relations became increasingly bound up in the operation of centralized, long-lived, multifamily households. Yet, centralization arguably failed to extend far past plankhouse walls, producing regionally decentralized economic communities. This paper examines the processes underlying this pattern from the vantage point of...
Cetacean Hunting on the northern Oregon Coast: Evidence from the Par-Tee Site (35CLT20) (2017)
Indigenous whale hunting on the Pacific Northwest Coast is predominately associated with whaling cultures north of Oregon in northern Washington and British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. Ethnographic and ethno-historical records from the northern Oregon Coast suggests whaling occurred locally, at least opportunistically. To date the only physical evidence of local whaling is a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) phalanx with an embedded elk (Cervus elaphus) bone harpoon point. A calibrated...