On Making Kw’ets’tel and Interpreting the Remnants: An Archaeological and Experimental Archaeological Study of Stó:lō - Coast Salish Slate Fishing Knives

Summary

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

Although critically important to the seasonal work of processing hundreds of thousands of fish for storage, kw’ets’tel, or Stó:lō-Coast Salish slate fish knives, are rarely recovered in the archaeological record. Knife-making debitage, however, is often recovered in great abundance during subsurface investigations in and near Stó:lō dwellings. Debitage assemblages are useful for exploring inter-household variability in labor allocations to knife production, although fuller considerations of household labor investments (and other inferential reconstructions of behavior) have been hampered by insufficient knowledge of kw’ets’tel design and production processes: source(s) of raw material and transport costs; the embodied work at different toolmaking stages; grinding techniques; ideal knife morphology; and ratios of debitage to final tool forms. A culmination of a two-year faculty-student research project, this poster presents and synthesizes new data and findings emerging from recent archaeological research and rigorous experimental exploration of kw’ets’tel production practices. We show how the products of experimental archaeological research afford new insights into routine household practices that, in turn, are critical to comparative reconstructions of household and settlement organization across space and over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25062