Excavations athe Hurdy Gurdy Bridge site (CA-DNO-1028), a Multicomponent Habitation Site in Northwest California

Summary

The Hurdy Gurdy Bridge site (CA-DNO-1028), located 19 kilometers in a direct line and 45 kilometers along the Smith and South Fork rivers from the coast, was excavated because it was within the impact area of the proposed replacement of a bridge over Hurdygurdy Creek by the Federal Highways Administration. Data recovery consisted of geophysical investigations, the excavation of backhoe trenches, shovel probes, and 42 square-meter excavation units. These investigations recovered cultural material from the Early/Middle Period transition through late Contact Period occupations defined by obsidian hydration (OH), AMS, and temporally diagnostic artifacts deposited on the bar and swale surface of a Pleistocene debris flow. A round, expedient, Late Period semi-subterranean plank house (Feature 10) dated to the late 14th Century may represent an intrusion into the Tolowa homeland by ethnically distinct people from the northern interior for trade. Comparison of OH defined occupations between the sites in the lower Smith River Basin and Hurdy Gurdy Bridge suggest that through time there were periods when upriver sites were occupied more frequently in favor of down-river sites, and vice versa. These population movements may have been in response to periods of drought.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

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