Analysis of the Faunal Distribution at the Weed Lake Ditch site (35HA341), Southeastern Oregon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Weed Lake Ditch is an open-air site located on the relict shores of Pluvial Lake Malheur in the Harney Basin of southeastern Oregon. Excavations by the University of Nevada, Reno and the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA) have revealed multiple stemmed points and crescent lithic technology in buried contexts. Faunal remains from the site are numerous but heavily fragmented in nature. Despite this, the faunal remains are still informative for making interpretations about the paleoclimatic and ecological conditions of the region during the site’s occupation. Distribution of the bone is not even throughout the site and is primarily concentrated in turbated soil roughly twenty centimeters below the surface in association with a dense cultural layer. Thorough excavation methods used by the CSFA resulted in increased recovery of faunal remains, enabling us to more effectively capture the overall faunal dispersal at site. Here we display the initial analysis of the faunal remains, as well as speculate on the meaning of their distribution, and how it is correlated with the coinciding lithic assemblage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33223