North America: Pacific Northwest Coast and Plateau (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Derian.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly fragmented assemblages are challenging for zooarchaeologists. Large numbers of morphologically unidentifiable specimens are time consuming to analyze and may yield little information relevant to project goals. Faced with an assemblage of 50,000 unidentifiable specimens from the Interior Plateau of British Columbia, I employed an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loren Davis.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations conducted from 2009-2018 at the Cooper's Ferry site in west-central Idaho revealed a long record of repeated human occupation encompassing the late Pleistocene to early Holocene periods. Lithostratigraphic unit 3 (LU3) is a loess deposit found near the bottom of the site that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Shantry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quartzite is a commonly identified material used in the past as heating stones. The quartz minerals in quartzite stones are stable to around 500 degrees Celsius, at which point the quartz mineral experiences a chemical transition or inversion. A second inversion occurs at around 1500 degrees Celsius, causing the morphology to appear similar to tooth enamel....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendra Maroney.

This is an abstract from the "Outreach and Education: Examples of Approaches and Strategies from the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed in-person interactions and typical outreach and educational events. The Kalispel Natural Resources Department and Cultural Resources Program strived to stay engaged in education throughout this difficult time and focused on delivering stand-alone content...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Lewis. Molly Casperson. Amy Tadlock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Willamette Valley Project of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) manages 13 reservoirs in northwestern Oregon. The USACE’s flood control mission requires annual water level drawdowns that expose the reservoir bed to cycles of lacustrine deposition, wave-action, and alluvial and colluvial erosion. Previous assessments of the impacts of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Gerard. Mark A. Tveskov. Scott M. Fitzpatrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fort Point (35-CU-11) is a pre-contact midden located on a marine terrace overlooking an important natural and historical feature known as Battle Rock along the southern Oregon Coast. Field investigation that took place in 2019 along the main promontory of the site revealed dense midden deposits that provide useful data on subsistence and residential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Noll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with the introduction of the concept of an Old Cordilleran Culture, research related to early Holocene tool production in northwestern North America appears to assume commonalities of tool production throughout a huge geographic area. This assumption persists despite the recognition of unique cultural traditions, namely Olcott and Cascade....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Ozbun.

This is an abstract from the "The Second-Oldest Sites in the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent reanalysis of selected artifacts from a 1974 archaeological salvage excavation at the precontact Rock Island Overlook site, 45CH204, in central Washington State indicates that cultural deposits are much older than previously reported. Projectile point chronology and obsidian hydration dating suggest the Rock Island Overlook site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haden Kingrey. Shannon Tushingham. John Blong.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earthen ovens in the Southern Columbia Plateau are associated with the preparation and cooking of roots and tubers, with evidence dating back to the middle Holocene. Despite issues with the preservation of these plant elements in the archaeological record, researchers can use microbotanical analyses to identify microscopic remains that oftentimes preserve...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Mack.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The southwestern flanks of Mt. Adams, Washington, contain numerous lava tube caves. These lava tubes can be quite complex, containing narrow passages on multiple levels. In the course of exploring these lava tubes, modern cavers have inadvertently discovered a total of sixteen projectile points and a flake tool, within twelve different lava tubes. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rorabaugh.

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A growing concern in archaeology is the potential inaccessibility of various methodological and theoretical approaches in non-academic contexts. Open access and open source software (R, Quantum GIS, ImageJ) provide means for applying complex analyses within a budget, but due to cybersecurity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ron Adams.

Expansive outcrops of high-quality cryptocrystalline silicate toolstone occur in many localities within the Columbia Plateau region of North America. Archaeological evidence indicates that these locations were utilized extensively by pre-contact Native American groups. The geological processes that shaped these landforms and produced outcropping lithic material also created ideal conditions for the growth plant food resources, particularly root crops. These root crops thrive on the lithosols...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Evaschuk. Keli Watson. Mike Robertson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations of natural geological kettle formations are uncommon in Cultural Resource Management projects in British Columbia. Discovery of a large cache of processed red ochre is even more rare with only one similar ochre cache known to exist on the Canadian Plateau. Ochre is an iron oxide prevalent in the Rainbow Mountain Range, part of the Anahim...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall Schalk.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have frequently conducted rock firing experiments to better understand different fracture patterns in fire-modified rock (FMR). These experiments have had varying degrees of control and their results have been difficult to interpret. This paper considers why this is the case and suggests that rock fracture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch. Annette Davis. Sarah Harris. Andrew Prunk. Hector Salazar.

Despite longstanding anthropological concerns with the origins of intensive delayed-return subsistence economies on the Northwest Coast, the use and production of slate fishing knives has received little attention. Owing to specific design attributes, thin slate fishing knives were critical to the necessarily efficient and rapid processing of tens of thousands of salmon in a span of only three or four months. Although anthropologists have a reasonably good understanding of how slate knives were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Snitker. Sean Bergin. Jonathan Paige. Anna Jansson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precontact archaeology in Washington State’s Central Cascades is not well studied due to the region’s remote location and perception as a marginal area separating cultural centers in the western and eastern portions of the state. Recent research in the adjacent North and South Cascades (i.e., North Cascades National Park and Mt. Rainier National Park) has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nowell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis of household storage strategies at the Bridge River Village in the British Columbia interior during the late prehistoric period has shown that there is potential to gain a better understanding of the accumulation of social capital at the household level. This poster incorporates feature content analysis of tools and raw materials from a series of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara L. Gonzalez.

In the language of self-determination, an indigenous archaeology is an expression of the sovereignty of a tribal nation to determine how its heritage will be cared for, now and into the future. Tribes, however, encounter several capacity-related challenges in developing tribally-specific heritage management plans. These challenges include the lack of funding for tribal historic preservation and repatriation, shortage of qualified staff, and, most significantly, operating within a heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Baley. Cameron Blumhardt. Kate Shantry. Glen Kirkpatrick. Colin Grier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, Washington State University archaeologists working in conjunction with the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation and the National Parks Service conducted a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the famous Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Site— Fort Clatsop, Oregon— in a fresh attempt to locate the remains of the fort. Evidence associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bob Reinhardt.

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Driving along Highway 22 in the western Cascade mountains of Oregon, motorists can’t help but notice Detroit Lake (created by Detroit Dam, a US Army Corps of Engineers multipurpose river development project) and the small town of Detroit on the reservoir’s banks. But they can’t see the site of Old...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Prentiss. Ashley Hampton. Thomas Foor. Matthew Walsh.

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists benefit from theoretical modeling in demographic ecology. Models generated by Bruce Winterhalder, Cedric Puleston, and colleagues provide us with precise predictions as to conditions favoring population growth, stability, decline, and associated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Lopez. Cristina Rodriguez-Franco.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Work by Chronicle Heritage" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We know fire can affect obsidian hydration, but how do forest fires, and our management practices impact these sites and their potential for data contribution under Criterion D? Is there a different way of going about evaluating data contribution or management practices to work with management in our age of large, intense climate-change...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiola Sanchez.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two of the most common features that frequently appear in many Northwest Coast archaeological sites are pit ovens and rock griddles with abundant remains of rock heating elements or fire-cracked rocks (FCR). Ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources have provided documentation of the different types of culinary traditions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meaghan Efford. Michelle George. Spencer Taft. Jesse Morin. Villy Christensen.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is more than simply fuel; it is one of the most significant ways in which humans connect with each other, within and across communities, and to their environments and homelands. This research is grounded at təmtəmíxʷtən, a large ancestral village site in what is now known as Burrard Inlet, British Columbia, Canada, in the traditional,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Casperson.

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Willamette Valley Project (WVP) is a Corps-managed flood risk management system composed of 13 dams and reservoirs spread across six subbasins in the upper Willamette River watershed. The construction of the dam system occurred 1940–1969 and subsequent operation inundated lands indigenous groups...