Nimíipuu Subsistence Cycle in the Bitterroot Mountains, USA: Integrating Ethnogeological and Archaeological Knowledge

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mountain environments and resources have played a significant role in Indigenous cultural and subsistence lifeways and knowledge systems yet remain underrepresented in landscape research. Archaeological methods and Indigenous earth knowledge are uniquely positioned to investigate human-environment relationships in mountain environments of the past and together emphasize the functionally interdependent nature of culture and ecology. We examine the role of upland landscape as part of the seasonal subsistence cycle and how landscape use relates to mobility, knowledge, land attachment, and place making through an enthogeological approach. Ethnogeology, pushes the boundaries of materialist and functional explanations of landscape, by incorporating Indigenously held place-based traditional earth systems knowledge with geologic and archaeologic methods to coproduce a holistic representation of the human-environment interactions. We present a case study focused on the role of the North Fork Clearwater River watershed in the Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho, in the seasonal subsistence cycle of the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce). Expanding our understanding of land use, mobility, and upland landscapes aids our interpretation of human-environment relationships as part of early landscape exploration and highlights the role of subsistence and non-subsistence-based mobility in the seasonal use of marginal landscapes, while also working to rehumanize the archaeological record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52672