North American - Basin Plateau (Geographic Keyword)
51-58 (58 Records)
In the summer of 2014, during the course of National Register evaluation of 45PO435, a site on the Kalispel Indian Reservation along the Pend Oreille River in the mountains of eastern Washington, an isolated small burned structure was located by means of magnetometry and ground penetrating radar. Its existence was confirmed by means of soil augering. Its dimensions were delineated by a combination of augering, excavation and electrical resistance. This paper discusses the contributions made by...
Repatriation of the Ancient One - A Tribal View: Then, Now, and In-Between (2016)
The Ancient One’s 8,400 year old remains were claimed by Native American Tribes as their ancestor after eroding from the banks of the Columbia River in 1996. What began as an Inadvertent Discovery, defined in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), turned into a 20 year challenge to the Act, tribal culture, oral traditions and religious beliefs. In 2004, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling allowing scientific study of the Ancient One; the...
The Results of Using Associated Records to Facilitate New Research: Recent Excavations at the Elk Mountain Site (48CR301) (2015)
The Elk Mountain site (48CR301), also known as the Garrett Allen site, is located in south-central Wyoming in the Carbon Basin along Halleck Ridge. The site was excavated every year from 1969 until 1978, and a University of Wyoming field school was held at the site in 1979 and 1980. The excavations were highly productive and recovered artifacts included ceramics, manos, and metates; large amounts of lithic debris, tools, and faunal remains. Despite its productivity, a site report, site map...
Setting and Function of the Pahranagat Valley, NV, Petroglyphs: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives (2015)
Rock art is landscape art, but what may be inferred from its setting and associations? It is commonly believed that function directly follows from setting and locational association, but the assumptions underlying this inference are not examined. The Lincoln County Class III rock art inventory is partly directed at the landscape implications of the Pahranagat Valley, NV, petroglyphs, providing an opportunity to consider this question. Associational inference, appropriately applied, combined with...
The Settlement Patterns of the Mid-Fraser Region of British Columbia: A Statistical Analysis of Housepit and Village Sizes (2017)
This poster presents a settlement pattern analysis calculating the relative size distribution of housepit villages along the Mid-Fraser Region of British Columbia. The pre-contact settlements in this study area, along the Fraser River plateau between Yale and Big Bar, are amongst the largest hunter-gatherer communities anywhere in the world. While previous studies in the region have concentrated on the Keatley Creek, Bell, and Bridge River housepit village sites, the research presented in this...
Sourcing FGV Artifacts Recovered from Housepit 54, Bridge River Housepit Village, British Columbia (2017)
Geochemical analysis of trace elements in fine grained volcanic rocks (FGV) using HHpXRF technology allows elemental characterization that enables matching fine grained volcanic artifacts with their original toolstone sources. Excavations of Housepit 54 during 2013-2016 field seasons have yielded a large assemblage of FGV artifacts that we attempt to match with toolstone sources or outcrops in the region. Preliminary research on characterizing artifacts recovered during the 2013 field season...
Traditional Native American Raw Material Sources in the Yellowstone Region (2017)
Obsidian and other lithic sources in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming and nearby Montana or Idaho were used up until contact with Euroamericans and information from oral traditions, ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, and toponymy provide data on the significance of certain raw material choices made by Native Americans such as the local Shoshone. Why did chipped stone weapons and tools persist even after new metal technologies were introduced? How did the choices of raw materials signal Native...
The Western Stemmed Tradition and the Glacier Peak Eruptions: a precautionary tale (2017)
Recent reviews of the radiocarbon record for Western Stemmed components on the Columbia Plateau suggest a post-Clovis age for this tradition. Controversies over the timing question are intensified by highly selective frames of references for mapping regional patterns of site distribution. Some sites are highlighted, other relevant sites ignored, and still others find their way into the debate through uncritical confirmation bias. This paper focuses on the latter confusion, examining the use of...