Generationally-Linked Archaeology: Northwest Coast of North America Example

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ed Carriere and I have spent the last four years doing what is often called experimental archaeology, replicating 2,000 year old baskets from the Biderbost wet/waterlogged archaeological site east of Seattle, Washington and reporting this in our new book: Re-awakening Ancient Salish Sea Basketry. After pondering what and why we were doing this, Ed as a cultural expert and myself as an archaeological scientist, decided our approach was more than experimental archaeology, and beyond ethnoarchaeology and the direct historical approach. Through our lives we approached the artifacts of basketry from different perspectives and temporal directions. I focused from deep-time forward, statistically tracing ancient traditions over the course of more than 3,000 years, while Ed worked from the present backwards, initially from what he learned from relatives and museum examples and now through archaeological examples from over 200 generations of his ancestors/grandparents. After viewing ancient baskets in museums, Ed created what he calls his "Archaeology" baskets, with rows/"layers" of weaves starting with those from 4,500 to 3,000, to 2,000 to 1,000 years ago. Our work tests my hypotheses explaining on-going cultural continuity in three regions of the Pacific Northwest, and especially in Ed’s inner Salish Sea region. We will show replicas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23098