The Osceola Mudflow: Dropping into the Valley and Standing Up Next to the Mountain in Southern Puget Sound

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On the Northwest Coast of North America cultural processes are intertwined with the natural environment. Five thousand six hundred years ago, a collapse on the northeast slope of Mount təqʷuʔməʔ [Rainier] caused the massive Osceola Mudflow (OM) event and transformed the landscape. In Lushootseed teachings, the Changer genre of stories distinguishes between the present and the past when people and animals were indistinguishable. The research presented here aims to connect land transformations and traditional ecological knowledge through the archaeological record. Local indigenous notions of place are tied to a mosaic of resources managed by people at various degrees and levels. The post-OM landscape has been and continues to be actively used with cultural continuity. How people used the landscape after the OM is connected to past use, however the pre-OM landscape is less visible, less understood, and underexplored. This study investigates the history of the OM through oral history, geology and the archaeological.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40366.0