It’s All About Context: How Culturally Informed Landscape Understandings Expand Knowledge of Archaeological Site Interpretation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tribal Cultural Landscapes are intimate and comprehensive understandings of place rooted in the ecologies, histories, and practices of those communities who create them. For the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (CTGR), these include all lands between the Cascade and Coast Mountain Ranges of Oregon, from the Columbia River to Mount Shasta. Due to ever growing settlement, population pressures, development, associated land use changes, the US Army Corps of Engineers installed 13 reservoirs beginning in the 1950s, known as the Willamette Valley Project. Under contract to USACE, the CTGR-Tribal Historic Preservation Office undertook a two-year study to synthesize those portions of its Tribal Cultural understanding of the Willamette Valley Project relevant to contemporary land management. While this study encompasses numerous archaeological cultural resources, it moves beyond traditional academic analysis by situating those same loci into the full complexities of daily life—ecological, historical, and cultural—enacted over millennia by the ancestors of the Tribe. The study further links these loci to ongoing cultural practices and provides insights into how agencies may better fulfill their cultural resource obligations to living communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36801.0