Buck Lake, Archaeological Research, and Subsistence and Settlement Patterns at Mount Rainier National Park

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For the past two decades, research directed at establishing onset of human use, patterned use of montane habitats, integration into lowland subsistence and settlement systems, and temporal change has been imbedded into CRM practices at Mount Rainier National Park. Once thought to be of little value to precontact people, high elevation landscapes on Mount Rainier, and Pacific Northwest mountains generally, are now known to have been a part of regional land-use systems for at least 9,000 years. Focusing on research at Buck Lake, a deeply stratified site on the NE flank of Mount Rainer, and on patterned distribution of precontact sites in the park, this paper considers the role of mountain environments in precontact Pacific Northwest land-use systems. Of particular concern are why montane environments were sought out in the precontact past; when routine human use of these landscapes began; how and why such use was environmentally patterned on the mountain; and whether or not montane land-use patterns changed through time. The paper emphasizes the importance of environmentally-based subsistence/settlement models with empirical test implications to guide research in CRM (and other) archaeological investigations; and to provide frames of reference to evaluate results and refine ongoing research objectives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23131