Overview of Excavations at Three Olcott Sites in Western Washington, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Excavations at three precontact sites adjacent to the Elwha River in western Washington State, USA, recovered about 800 bone specimens and 40,000 chipped stone artifacts. The combined artifact assemblage is characteristic of Olcott-type sites in western Washington, most notably the presence of lanceolate projectile points manufactured from fine-grained and locally available volcanic raw materials.

The assemblage is dominated by debitage (95 percent), but also includes projectile points, bifaces, modified flakes, cores, and scrapers made from andesitic and dacitic raw material. The vast majority of bone specimens are calcined and unidentifiable to species. However, several bones were identified as deer remains. Preliminary results suggest a middle to early Holocene occupation of Pleistocene river terraces used to acquire nearby raw material in order to manufacture tools for hunting and processing deer and deer-sized mammals. As one of the largest Olcott assemblages, this is an important dataset for discussing early to middle Holocene land use on the Olympic Peninsula and western Washington.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36943.0