Backed Knives and Subsistence Strategies at the Hurdy Gurdy Bridge Site

Summary

Excavations conducted near the ancestral Tolowa village of Naa-k’vt-‘at on the South Fork of the Smith River produced unexpected results in terms of the apparent absence of tools, such as harpoon tips and fishing weights, related to salmon fishing. Rather, an unusual lithic tool was identified, described as a "backed" knife produced from splitting a biface or uniface longitudinally to facilitate hand-held use. This paper will explore the possible function(s) of this tool in ancestral Tolowa assemblages and then compare the overall lithic assemblage of CA-DNO-1028 with the results from limited testing conducted at the ancestral village of Lhch’aa-ghii~li~ (CA-DNO-34) located downriver at the confluence of the middle and south forks of the Smith River. The clear identification of salmon fishing implements at CA-DNO-34 and the absence of these tools at CA-DNO-1028 suggest that the backed knives must have functioned in a capacity other than salmon processing and that upriver settlement was the focus of subsistence activities other than salmon fishing despite their availability.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times: Mobility and Subsistence in a Tale of Two Sites in the Smith River Basin of Northwestern California

Keywords

Spatial Coverage