Specialization, Standardization, and Opportunism: A Design Theory Perspective on the Production of Cultural Necessities at Tse-whit-zen Village

Summary

Lithic artifacts recovered from the Tse-whit-zen village, a large settlement on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca inhabited for 2,800 years, assist in portraying the choices made by people for adapting to the surrounding environment through tool development. Analysis of the lithic assemblage is based on a design theory approach that addresses material selection and reductive manufacturing strategies to understand efficiency, expediency, and reliability in forming the end products. The assemblage is dominated by fabricating tools such as flakes, anvils, hammerstones, and abraders. Mobiliary art in the form of stones with incised designs occur in significant numbers, while tools specific to food procurement such as projectile points, net weights, and fishhook shanks constitute a very small percentage. In contrast, manufactured bone items are almost entirely specialized, standardized components for fishing gear. Cutting, engraving and incising tools were required to produce both the bone tools and the socially significant incised stones but high quality flaking material is not common in the area. Rather than importing exotic material, the artisans developed techniques for producing reliable, standardized cutting tools such as quartz crystal microtools and large spall flake tools from local materials that were less than optimal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Study of Human Ecodynamics at Tse-whit-zen, a 2,800-Year-Old Lower Elwha Klallam Coastal Village in Washington State, U.S.A.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15661