Ready, aim, fire: darts, arrows, and pre-contact era fire use in the western Cascades

Summary

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

In Oregon, Indigenous oral histories and ethnohistories document the use of fire as an important part of the Indigenous subsistence system. Fire was used for plant tending, harvesting, and collecting, but also in hunting. Transitions in hunting technologies are often associated with significant changes in entire subsistence systems. For instance, the transition from atlatl and dart to bow and arrow in western North America as evidenced by morphological changes in lithic projectile points is hypothesized to have been associated with shifts in social organization, settlement, and resource use dynamics. Further, the timing of the dart-arrow transition is hypothesized to have varied geographically, with some groups retaining the atlatl longer than others. In this paper, we test a late dart-arrow transition hypothesis and explore how this transition may have differentially affected patterns of Indigenous fire use for a watershed in Oregon’s western Cascades. We integrate multiple lines of evidence, including radiocarbon dates, obsidian sourcing and hydration, cross-dated fire histories, ecological site interpretation, and ethnohistory to refine chronological analysis of the dart-arrow transition and its implications for local fire ecology.

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): 40430.0