North American - Basin Plateau (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (58 Records)
Following the discovery of gold and growing reports of trouble in eastern Oregon, the US Military established a series of four forts to protect settlers and miners flocking to this part of the state and to insure continued use of local military roads. One of these forts, Camp Warner, served as the primary military fort in the Warner Valley from 1866 to 1874. Camp Warner actually consisted of two separate fort locations; old Camp Warner in use from 1866-1867, and new Camp Warner in use from...
Interior Salish Organizational Principles: Recasting the Dynamics of Sociopolitical Change in Aggregated Village Archaeology on the Northern Plateau (2017)
The Middle Fraser Canyon of south-central British Columbia is well-known for the large Late Prehistoric aggregated pithouse villages that line the terraces of the region’s major rivers and tributaries. These villages represent a dynamic period in the history of Northern Interior Salish societies. Our understanding of the cultural dynamics underlying the formation and breakup of these large villages has been limited by reliance on theories that are rooted in uniquely Western concepts of...
I’m your Huckleberry: Monitoring impacts on traditionally utilized food sources of the Pomeroy Ranger District, Umatilla National Forest, Southeastern Washington (2017)
The utilization of traditional foods in the Columbia Plateau on ceded tribal lands is of great importance to present day indigenous communities within the region. Huckleberries (vaccinium spp.) are one of these highly valued traditional food stuffs among the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) and the Nez Perce among others. However, the impacts of forest projects (i.e. logging, and prescribed burning) on this reserved treaty resource are poorly understood. Bearing...
The Landscape of Klamath Basin Rock Art (2015)
For the past three decades, efforts to interpret Klamath Basin rock art symbols using ethnographic literature and concepts of sacred landscapes have advanced our understanding of the art. This approach, however, is limited by the assumption that the rock art symbols meant the same thing in every social and land use context. From my research of the past decade I have inferred that rock art designs are not distributed randomly across the landscape. Instead, rock art displays appear to vary...
Lithic Raw Materials Procurement and Exchange at Housepit 54, Bridge River Site, British Columbia: What a Diachronic Perspective Reveals (2015)
While the Bridge River settlement in the Middle Fraser Canyon of British Columbia is located in one of the richest salmon producing areas on the Fraser River, occupants of the site had limited direct access to many sources of raw material critical for production of chipped stone tools. Current excavations by Dr. Anna Prentiss at Bridge River Housepit 54 focus on an estimated 15 housepit occupation floors dating in the range of 1000 to 1500 cal. B.P. This allows for a unique study of...
Lithics and the Late Prehistoric: Changing Adaptive Strategies on the Southeastern Columbia Plateau (2017)
How do people adapt to the changing natural and social environment of the late prehistoric (3,000 B.P. to historic), Columbia Plateau? By interacting and learning from one another, and by adapting their technology. Though frequently characterized as a homogenous culture area over the past 3,000 years, previous analyses show differences in artifact form, assemblage composition and household features. This project traces these changes through the stone tools of the archaeological record. Research...
Macro-regional cultural development of the Interior Columbia Plateau (2015)
Despite a wealth of data and continued opportunities for data collection, the prehistory of the Interior Columbia Plateau of the Northwestern United States continues to be organized and discussed on the basis of a handful of local regional chronologies. Many of those popularly in use were created decades ago and (in spite of a few notable exceptions) there remains a need for the archaeological community to generate a more synthetic chronology. This paper tests the premise that cultural...
Magnetic Susceptibility of Soils: Tephra, Erosion, and Fire on Columbia Plateau Landscapes (2017)
Sedimentation and soil formation on uplands of the Columbia Plateau are strongly influenced by climate, tephras, erosion of arid lands, and fire regimes. Magnetic susceptibility of in situ strata, and laboratory samples from arroyo profiles of the Yakima Upland Fold Belt can help untangle the interactions of these processes in shaping natural and cultural landscapes. Records from four profiles of overlapping age (500 to 9000 BP) are compared. Data for mass specific magnetic susceptibility are...
Making Sense of Kennewick Man (2016)
For almost 20 years, the >9000 year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man has been the subject of rumor, media hyperbole, lawsuit, political posturing, and even some good science. Archaeological, osteological, morphometric, stable-isotope, chronometric, and genetic studies have now been completed and reported and more than 50 scholars have presented their findings in internet publications, journals, and books. Widely divergent claims have been made about this man’s heritage and place of origin. He...
Method and Theory in the Archaeology of Interior Salish Rock Art Sites on the British Columbia Plateau. (2017)
Interior Salish rock art sites on the British Columbia Plateau are multi-component assemblages which include the geomorphology, the rock art and other surface and subsurface elements such as trails, manuports, petroforms, hearths, lithics, radiocarbon dates, flora and fauna. Defining the inter-relationships of these components is essential to understanding the site formation process. In addition, direct historical and cultural continuity between these sites and Interior Salish descendant...
Microwear Analysis of Mica Lamented Quartzite Scrapers from Slocan Narrows, Upper Columbia River Area (2017)
Ethnographic evidence suggests that semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers in the interior Pacific Northwest inhabited aggregated winter villages on a multi-season basis and specific times throughout the year much of the group made long distance forays for resource procurement, trade, and exchange. Extensive excavation efforts at the Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village has produced an assemblage of mica lamented quartzite scrapers. This study presents findings from analysis and characterization of...
Middle Archaic Expansion into High Elevation Habitats: A View from the Southwestern Great Basin (2015)
Several researchers have hypothesized that high elevation habitats were not intensively used until after 4000 cal BP when lowland settlements became more stable and logistical hunting organization emerged. This paper evaluates this hypothesis by comparing the relative frequency of Pinto versus Elko/Humboldt series projectile points across a variety of lowland and upland settings in the White Mountains/Owens Valley area. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...
The Middle Fork Geophysics Project, Central Idaho (2017)
The Middle Fork Salmon River is a designated Wild and Scenic river located within the heart of the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho. Over the last three years the University of Pittsburgh, the Salmon-Challis National Forest and the University of Sheffield have collaborated on a minimally invasive multi-method geophysical and geochemical approach for characterizing intact archaeological deposits at seven prehistoric sites impacted by recreational activities. The...
Montana Project Archaeology: Best Practices from a Teacher--Student Field School Collaboration in Virginia City, Montana (2015)
Located in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Montana State University (MSU), Bozeman, the Montana Project Archaeology (MPA) program has hosted a variety of professional development courses, institutes and workshops for teachers in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Idaho since 2003. In 2013, MPA collaborated with MSU’s Department of Anthropology, the private archaeological firm InteResources, Inc., the Montana Heritage Commission and private landowners to conduct an archaeological...
More than a Bivouac, Less than a Village: Middle Archaic Use of Great Basin Alpine and Other Uplands (2015)
The role of Great Basin alpine/upland habitats within broader land-use strategies has long been debated. We explore upland and lowland data from either side of the White Mountain highlands to reconstruct late Middle Archaic (~1350-2500 B.P.) use of regional landscapes. This information suggests that regionally wide-ranging, logistically organized patrilineal groups made seasonal use of alpine and other uplands for late summer/fall hunting and gathering prior to winter encampment in valley...
Multidisciplinary Reconstruction of Interactive Change in Holocene Treeline, Paleoclimate,and High Altitude Hunting Systems in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado (2015)
More than eighty high altitude game drives are known along north central Colorado’s continental divide, but until recently there has been limited understanding of the interactive effect of cyclical climate and ecosystem change on Holocene alpine tundra hunting systems. University of Northern Colorado researchers, after fifteen years of high altitude archaeological and paleoclimate research, have produced an early phase reconstruction of game drive use and elevation-specific environmental zone...
NAGPRA Human Remains Inventory: Making Our Work More Vsible (2016)
In 2008, Central Washington University NAGPRA Program and the Columbia Plateau Tribes created a more visible, participatory osteobiography process. CWU let go of the “culture of secrecy” around our NAGPRA human remains documentation process and found the benefits outweigh fears. The change showed the tribes what we really do and generated research questions from Tribal representatives.
Paleoethnobotany on the Columbia Plateau: A Case Study from the Pend Oreille River Valley (2016)
Paleoethnobotanical studies of hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages on the Columbia Plateau in the Pacific Northwest are exceedingly rare and often poorly reported. The Flying Goose Site (45PO435), located along the Pend Oreille River in northeastern Washington offers an opportunity to examine a Plateau culture area archaeobotanical assemblage in greater detail. Summer excavations in 2014 and 2015 indicate that this late Prehistoric site appears to have been some form of small structure,...
The Paleoindian-Archaic Transition in the Western United States: A Bayesian Approach (2017)
Summed probability distributions of large radiocarbon datasets provide a powerful method for investigating prehistoric population change at multi-centennial and millennial scales of analysis. However, summed probability distributions cannot account for statistical scatter and uncertainties accompanying individual calibrated radiocarbon dates, which means that they are ineffective for answering questions related to cultural persistence and change on shorter centennial scales. For these shorter...
Pre-Historic Archaeological Site Location Modeling Using Raster Overlay Analysis in GIS (2016)
The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the ability to create a viable site location model of pre-historic archaeological sites in the Columbia Plateau Region that are older than 15,000 BP. The site location model is created by analyzing several different variables: previously discovered archaeological sites in the Columbia Plateau Region older than 10,000 BP, Missoula Flood modeling, Bonneville Flood geological evidence, and prehistoric climate data. The prehistoric site locations are used to...
Preserving Tribal Resources on the Reservation (2016)
The Spokane Tribal Preservation Program’s work within Reservation boundaries focuses on locating and monitoring tribal resources along the Spokane River and upland areas by a tribal field crew. Artifacts recovered from field surveys and excavations are curated within a tribal collections facility. Utilizing a partnership between its staff and tribal members, the Program is able to identify these important resources and provide a rich layer of tribal history to these objects. Through collections...
Problematic Pixels: Prehistoric Residential Floor Recognition in the Pend Oreille Valley (2017)
Public archaeology, as constructed in the United States, is heavily invested in the efficient use of tax and rate payer moneys to identify archaeological sites. The form of that investment, typically, results in a well certified and experienced archaeological practitioner walking the land and/or systematically probing soils. Although well established, this approach is not without its conspicuous errors and project crushing missteps. With the recent proliferation of remote sensing datasets (e.g.,...
The Promontory Phase in the Eastern Great Basin (2017)
Julian Steward found a distinctive culture in the uppermost levels of several caves on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake and labeled it Promontory after the low range of mountains containing the caves. Based on stratigraphy, material diagnostics and findings elsewhere along the Wasatch Front, he placed the Promontory culture subsequent to the Puebloan (Fremont) and prior to the Shoshone presence. Steward recognized the possibility that these recent cave occupants were Athapaskan speakers...
Public Outreach and Pipeline Archaeology in the Western United States (2015)
Cultural resource companies are increasingly tasked with disseminating the results of their archaeological research to the public. Because the nature of the archaeological record differs for each compliance project and because there are many different "publics" who can be identified, archaeologists have taken several different approaches to public outreach. In the last decade, Alpine Archaeological Consultants, Inc. has created a variety of public outreach products that describe what was...
Radiocarbon Chronology of the Western Stemmed Tradition on the Columbia Plateau (2016)
The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) is an early cultural phase on the Columbia Plateau of Western North America. Much of the seminal work establishing the timeframe of WST is now decades old and suffers from imprecise dating. In this poster, we review previously compiled data, update stratigraphic interpretations, and model existing radiocarbon assays within a Bayesian framework. Preliminary results indicate that WST on the Columbia Plateau is at least coeval with Clovis and spanned at least...