Re-Awakening a 2,000 Year Old Salish Sea Basketry Tradition and Sharing it Around the World: Master Salish Basketmaker and Wet Site Archaeologist Explore 100 Generations of Cultural Knowledge

Summary

Ed Carriere and I have been working with the U.W. Burke Museum to replicate 2,000 year old waterlogged archaeological basketry found in the early 1960s from along the Snoqualmie River near Seattle. Ed learned old style split cedar limb/root clam basket making from his Great Grandmother, Julia Jacobs, who raised him. Ed’s goal has always been to go back as many generations in his family to master their work. As a wet site archaeologist specializing in ancient basketry on the Northwest Coast, I work from the other direction, deep-time, statistically linking ancient basketry styles from throughout the region to the present. I had a brilliant idea while re-assessing the 2,000 year old basketry collection from the Snoqualmie River site, asking Ed to try replicating these baskets that statistically linked through 100 generations from this site through 1,200, 750, and 500 year old Salish Sea wet site basketry to his Great Grandmother’s old style in an approach we call Generationally-linked archaeology. Local Native weavers and anthropologists applaud this work and last summer we shared our work with the Indigenous Ainu on Hokkaido, Japan, and with archaeologist at the Wetland Archaeology Research Project (WARP) conference in Bradford, England to a good response.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Reconstructing Indigenous Practices in Museum Settings: Perspectives and Approaches

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16204