Paleoethnobotany on the Columbia Plateau: A Case Study from the Pend Oreille River Valley

Summary

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, which was likely purposefully burned and subsequently buried under relatively sterile silts. The unusually well preserved structural remains at Flying Goose offer an excellent opportunity to examine Plateau architecture, internal and external use of space, and both nutritional and technological use of plants. The presence of plant food remains, the lack of artifacts or zooarchaeological data, and comparison to regional and continental ethnographic knowledge allows us rethink commonly established notions of gender and mobility on the Columbia Plateau.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Archaeoethnobotany and Household Contexts

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