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Hopes for refocussing
“The museum is already there,” says Andrefsky, referring to
WSU’s Museum of Anthropology, directed by Mary Collins. “It has
collections from the old days, which we can go back and analyze in
new ways.”
The museum, which is primarily curatorial, contains many
collections that have been only quickly analyzed, if at all,
including hurriedly excavated artifacts from the Marmes site, one
of the oldest documented human occupations in North America.
Andrefsky points also to the recently developed Plateau Center and
WSU’s longtime relationship with regional tribes.
“There are a lot of resources right at our fingertips,” he says.
And not just resources, but multiple questions. “We have
hunter-gatherer archaeology here, we’ve got complex hunter-gatherer
archaeology here, we’ve got major social change on the coast during
aboriginal time periods, incredible stuff, ripe for theory, too,
fascinating stuff.”
Andrefsky’s optimism is fueled by the many major questions that
have recently been identified. Much remains to be explored, both on
the coast and on the Plateau.
During the heyday of reservoir building, all the money was
directed toward salvage work on the big rivers, primarily the Snake
and Columbia. Now those sites are submerged—at least until the
reservoirs silt in or the dams are breached. As a result, what
archaeology is being done in the Plateau region has moved up out of
the canyons into the uplands.
“As a result of lack of reservoir work, people are starting to
look in the uplands, ... places they haven’t looked in the
past.”
Andrefsky points to sites “right here in Pullman” that have long
been ignored.
“[We] don’t know how these sites fit into the larger occupation
picture down on the river.”
At one time, he says, there were huge occupations where the
Deschutes and the John Day rivers come into the Columbia.
“Then for a 3,000-year period nobody was there.”
Like the better-known Anasazi of the Southwest, these people
simply disappeared.
It turns out those same kinds of villages that were abandoned
are now located far upriver, in the upper stretches of the John
Day.
While it’s not clear that these are the same people, the village
structures are the same.
Were they the same people? What happened? Was there flooding?
Drought? Was it warmer inland? Or safer, perhaps?
Another excavation, on the Oregon Plateau, revealed human
coprolites—petrified feces—over 12,000 years old. DNA analysis
showed the people at that site were eating horse; it was previously
thought that the native horse had been long extinct at the
time.
Andrefsky points to yet other unresolved questions. It is now
believed that there were migrations—perhaps many—into North America
between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago.
“My feeling,” says Andrefsky, “is that one of the places [where]
they could have turned into the interior was right here at the
Columbia River.
“That means the interior Northwest should hold promise of some
of the earliest people in all of the New World, because the ice
sheet reached as far south as Spokane.”
Andrefsky talks about a graduate student who came here recently
from the University of Wyoming. He was interested in arrow
technology and brought with him some arrows he had found on the
Great Plains. Andrefsky suggested that he begin documenting arrow
technology across North America. It turns out the earliest sites
were on the Plateau, including the Harder site near Washtucna.
“How did it come that arrow technology was earliest in the
Plateau?” Andrefsky asks. “It obviously didn’t start here.
The technology is 10,000 years old in the Old World. In fact the
dating takes these arrows back only 2,400 years, which is actually
fairly recent, even in American archaeology.”
But the first documented arrows in the Southwest are 1,500 years
old.
“Isn’t that neat?” Andrefsky says, from the edge of his seat.
“The earliest is right here.”
Meanwhile, in his Olympia laboratory, Dale Croes has set up a
model of an acorn leaching system used by coastal tribes. A basket
of acorns would be buried in a shallow aquifer. The constant wash
of fresh water would leach the harsh tannins from the acorns,
yielding a nutritious meal. Intriguingly, Japanese archaeologists
have discovered identical systems used in northern Japan, one
tantalizing reason the Japanese are interested in, and have
invested heavily in, Northwest archaeology.
“The Indians around here take great notice,” says Croes, “that
they will put a billion dollars a year into doing archaeology, and
it’s not their ancestry.
“Why can’t we be more like that here? We may not be Indian, but
this is where we live. It’s a lot of what we are.”
Colin Grier will be excavating a 2,000-year-old house on Galiano
Island in the Canadian Gulf Islands this summer. He is
investigating a cultural shift that occurred over the past 5,000
years, a move toward multi-family dwellings and the development of
social hierarchy.
“It’s unique when a bunch of people want to live together,” says
Grier. “It suggests something unique about this large social,
collaborative unit. And how does that fit in with the overall
organization of Northwest Coast people?”
Public attention may well be directed toward the prehistory and
early migrations into the Pacific Northwest now that the courts
have cleared the way again for study of the 9,000-year-old
Kennewick Man remains. In spite of the unresolved cultural issues
in how those remains have been handled, any information as to who
Kennewick Man was and whether or not he is an ancestor of
contemporary tribes could give profound insight into the deep
history of human occupation of the New World.
“Without getting too cosmic,” says Gary Wessen, “I’m 58 years
old and have been doing this stuff continuously since 1973.
“Archaeological resources come closer to being magical than
anything else in my existence. Archaeological sites have a real
time-transcendent quality. The first director of the [Makah] museum
likes to say Ozette is his book. And books can talk to us.
“But I like to [say] archaeological sites are better than books. If
we’re smart, we can have a dialogue with the past.”
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