Dominant Narratives and Gender Equality in Northwest Coast Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores Julie Stein’s work to challenge dominant narratives of precontact culture history of the Northwest Coast using geoarchaeological evidence. We compare feminist archaeology perspectives on standpoint theory and implicit bias in discussing how and why she arrived at a new approach to shell midden site formation on the San Juan Islands, Washington. By demonstrating that the base levels of shell middens are impacted by groundwater and that middens accumulate at vastly different rates both within and between sites, Stein questioned the narrative that there was an increase in social complexity in the late Holocene in the San Juan Islands. Throughout her career, she established that shell middens require both site and landscape-level geoarchaeological analysis before making broad interpretations of settlement patterns and social complexity. She guided her students towards carefully building new interpretations of the past using multiple forms of geological and archaeological evidence. We consider how Stein’s approach impacted our 2005-2010 research on small shell middens and interior island occupations, as well as our experience of gender in conducting archaeology in the Pacific Northwest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23366