Coast Salish Archaeology

Ethnohistory 2009
In 2003, construction began on a graving dock that would bring marine projects to the Olympic Peninsula and provide family-wage jobs. It appeared to be a good fit for the city of Port Angeles, Washington, and its surrounding communities. Shortly after construction began, workers unearthed an approximately 2,700–year- old Coast Salish village and cemetery, claimed by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe as an ancestral site. Significantly, indigenous reports of being haunted by the spirits of their disturbed ancestors and nonnative desires to bury the past and move forward resulted in intercultural conflicts and misunderstandings. Such struggles speak to the contested nature of history and the deeply rooted concerns about the region’s socioeconomic future following the decline of natural resource industries.

Coast Salish First Nations wove their robes and blankets from yarn spun from processed wool fibres.  A curious fact, usually mentioned in passing by early explorers, ethnographers, and settlers, is that, in the preparation of wool fibres, a powdery, silky " white clay " was beaten into the wool using a sword-like wooden stick. This practice is confirmed by traditional knowledge preserved by Coast Salish people on Vancouver Island, the mainland of British Columbia, and in Washington State. While museums with extensive Coast Salish collections have no " clay " objects in their collections that are associated with weaving and spinning, they do have lumps of diatomaceous earth as well as tools associated with both diatomaceous earth and the spinning and weaving of wool. Is diatomaceous earth the same as the white clay mentioned in the historical accounts? Or are they different from one another? If so, were they both used? Do they have the same properties? In this article, I assemble the historical and ethnographic records of this curious clay in order to clarify the enigmatic first step in the processing and preparation of Coast Salish wool.

My intent is to explore the significance of the ancient spiritual connection of the Coast Salish people to the peninsula of Point Roberts, Washington, utilizing such tools as Salish creation myths, legends, place-names and artifacts, along with Vibration Photography© energy scans and interpretations.

On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe (JST) is implementing cultural heritage approaches to reclaim tribal histories threatened by nineteenth century settler colonial narratives of ethnic erasure. Exiled from their capital village of Qatáy in Port Townsend during the 1870s as a result of government-mandated arson and displacement, JST homelands also include Olympic National Park, popularly lauded as a pristine wilderness area. Emanating from the Tribe’s previously unrecognized federal status, accusations of assimilation and extinction have simultaneously contributed to the non-Indigenous public’s denial of JST existence. By restoring archaeological sites with modern significance and erecting counter-monuments to commemorate tribal leaders and events, the JST have embarked upon a journey of challenging their veiled history. Perhaps surprisingly, this resistance against historical amnesia has produced reconciliatory outcomes between the Tribe and non-Natives. Through a lens of resiliency and regeneration, this article documents one tribal nation’s opposition to being consigned to the past, and their dedication to continued relevancy for future generations.

Consistently, Coast Salish mortuary practices demonstrate one element in common, even as burial customs have developed over the course of the Marpole Period to the present day: resistance to authority and societal pressures. Building upon the seminal work of Suttles (1958), Thom (1995, 1998), and Mathews (2006, 2014), this study offers a comprehensive examination of pre- and post-contact Coast Salish burial practices, as well as their corresponding emphasis on social rank, status, or loss of social stratification as identified in the mortuary record. Beginning with an examination of the evolution of ranked social classes in Marpole and Late Period midden, cairn, and mound burials, I conclude with a detailed discussion of enclosed “grave house” burials (originating with Euro-American contact) and the late nineteenth century development of the Indian Shaker Church to demonstrate how recent burial practices are a reaction to and reflection of settler colonial encroachment upon Coast Salish territories. In doing so, I provide evidence that Coast Salish societies grew increasingly unified against non-Native presence at the turn of the century, exchanging previous individual and class-based social rank systems for community-oriented identification that aided in retaining Coast Salish spirituality, access to land, and kinship networks during times of intense cultural turmoil. Compared to Marpole and Late Periods, which witnessed  fluctuations in status and resistance to elite authority figures, ethnographic Coast Salish burial phases reveal that certain aspects of pre-colonial Coast Salish social structure were sacrificed to foster tribal solidarity against foreign imposition during the Early Colonial era. Using an inter-disciplinary approach advocated by Morris (1992) that combines multiple strands of evidence including grave goods, demography, spatiality, ritual, history, ethnography, and comparative studies, I employ an anthropological lens to analyze the subversive nature of past and present Coast Salish social organization.

Around 1500 years ago, the Coast Salish peoples of southwestern British Columbia began to inter their dead within funerary petroforms. These burials, consisting of patterned arrangements of stone and soil built over the dead, marked a dramatic transition from below ground burials within the village, to above ground cemeteries located around village peripheries. This upward and outward movement of the dead is exemplified at the Rocky Point Peninsula on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island. It is one of the largest mortuary landscapes on the Northwest Coast of North America, with 515 visible funerary petroforms distributed within and between two large neighbouring cemeteries.

Catherine Bell’s (1992) notion of ritualization challenges us to consider what the building of funerary petroforms accomplished that previous funerary practices did not. While funerals are times of grieving, they may also be ritual actions in which the dead are transformed from corpse to ancestor and the family from mourner to inheritor. It was in the authority of tradition that funerary ritual served as a process for both enacting and contesting relationships of power within and between the two neighbouring communities at Rocky Point.

Foregoing excavation, Coast Salish protocols of working with their dead challenged me to consider how the external and material attributes of funerary petroforms worked through space and time to produce a landscape inhabited by these durable, ancestral agents. Focusing on the mesoscale encompassing these two large cemeteries, this dissertation is an analysis of the depositional practices employed by the Rocky Point peoples in the burial of their dead. Tacking between an ethnographic thematic analysis of Coast Salish ritualization, a body of social theory, and the archaeological record, I used a novel suite of quantitative analyses to identify patterns in how these burials were made, in addition to how they were placed relative to one another on the landscape. Results point to a fundamental bifurcation in funerary petroform morphology and placement, in part, differentiating communities of ritual practice at Rocky Point. In particular, the results highlight the social significance of the spaces between the burials, as much as the burials themselves. This is exemplified by a perceptual paradox in which these above ground features, built according to shared dispositions of practice and placed on distinctive landscapes, are simultaneously and intentionally hidden from day to-day movement between villages. This Rocky Point sense of monumentality speaks to the liminality of their most powerful dead, anchored at the threshold of the living.

Funerary petroforms have a persistent power to entangle the living and the dead in oblique relationships of power. The resilience of this memory work, however, is not limited to the past. At Rocky Point and other cemeteries throughout the Salish Sea, these ancestral places provide living descendants with a tangible connection to family and community history. Possessing a durability that continues to enmesh people and places through time, funerary petroforms are one of the fulcrums upon which relations of power are presently balanced between Coast Salish and settler communities in British Columbia.

This study explores the long and close relationship between the Sts’ailes people and their cultural landscape in the Harrison Watershed in Southwestern B.C. Archaeological, geographic, environmental, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric data are used to assess Sts’ailes social organization and social relations. Working under the assumption
that spatial distance is a reflection of social distance, the patterning of houses and settlements reveal five social units: the tribe, the extended settlement community, the settlement community, the local group, and the household. Examination of these social units provides insight into how people within them interacted socially, economically, and politically and how each unit had an important role within pre-contact Sts’ailes society. At the settlement scale, major social changes are evident ~1,200 cal. B.P., based on the co-utilization of both plank houses and pithouses and large variation in house size. This study demonstrates the value of exploring cultural landsapes at various social and spatial scales.

This article documents nearly three years of investigations concerned with locating, mapping, and analyzing the spatial configuration of residential pithouse and plankhouse features in Chehalis territory. We propose that the Chehalis people organized their houses and settlements along a four kilometer stretch of the Harrison River in order to control socioeconomic activities occurring within their territory. We provide theories borrowed from the disciplines of human ecology and cultural ecology and document ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and oral historical evidence to show that the Chehalis occupied a key locale on the Harrison-Lillooet interaction corridor. The Chehalis' role in this trade and navigation corridor linking the coast and interior was that of economic middlemen.

Expanding on the Burke Museum's " Puget Sound Traditional Foods " database, this project used archaeobotanical, ethnographic, and historical evidence to enhance our understandings of the co-production of people, plants, and place in the historic Duwamish-Green-White River Watershed. I compared the archaeobotanical record with regional ethnographies to analyze the role that plants played in pre-contact Coast Salish diets, and the interplay between the particular nutritional and ecological properties of plants and Coast Salish daily life. The primary goals of this project were 1) to augment the Puget Sound Traditional Foods database with more information about plant use (both for food and as technologies), 2) to gain greater insight into indigenous stewardship of upland terrestrial habitats, and 3) to investigate the relationship between social networks and plant foods. The study provisionally affirms archaeological theories of resource intensification beginning ~2,500 – 3,000 years BP. The study also provides preliminary insight into the interplay between the location of particular plant foods in the watershed and Coast Salish social organization as documented in the ethnographic record. The higher proportion of root foods in the inland and montane sites gestures toward dietary differences between saltwater and inland, where carbohydrates may have played a more important role. This in turn may have shaped the extent to which landscapes were managed for culturally important root foods on the Enumclaw Plateau.

The research involved the efforts of a wet archaeological site specialist (Dale Croes) and a Master Basketmaker and Elder from the Suquamish Tribe (Ed Carriere), who joined together to replicate and scientifically analyze the 2,000-year-old basketry collection from the Biderbost wet site, Snoqualmie Tribal Territory, housed at the University of Washington (UW) Burke Museum Archaeology Program (Figure 1). Working on this analysis and replication project over the past four years, we concluded that it was not enough to call this a case of Experimental Archaeology; we describe our work as a new approach termed Generationally-Linked Archaeology, an approach that chronologically connects from both directions, linking contemporary cultural specialists with ancient and ancestral basketmakers through the science of archaeology. We present our approach here after publicly presenting our efforts to both indigenous and scientific archaeological audiences, including Native peoples at the Northwest Native American Basketweavers Association, Indigenous Ainu of northern Japan, and at a National Maori Weavers conference in New Zealand, and to archaeological scientists at two annual SAA conferences, the Wetland Archaeo-logical Research Project (WARP) 30th Anniversary Conference in Bradford, England, and a Wetland Archaeology Conference in central France.

In 2004 archaeologist Dale Croes and Native American basketmaker Ed Carriere began an unusual collaboration to study and eventually reconstruct ancient baskets from the Pacific Northwest.

Suquamish Elder and Master Basketmaker Ed Carriere was thrilled when he first saw the fragments of ancient cedar baskets in the Biderbost Collection at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum in Seattle. .Carriere was fourteen when tribal elders first taught him how to weave traditional baskets. At age eighty, seeing a fragment one of his ancestors had created by hand 2,000 years ago was something new. “It really got me so interested that I just had to replicate and weave like that,” Carriere said.

The visit to the Burke, which took place in 2014, was the result of a collaborative effort between Carriere and archaeologist Dale Croes, an adjunct professor at Washington State University. The men had joined forces over a decade earlier when Croes began inviting Carrier to his digs to help excavate 700-year-old clam baskets almost identical to those Carriere has made throughout his lifetime. Their combination of scientific approach and traditional cultural knowledge has expanded our understanding of the history and techniques of Northwest basketry and its importance in native culture. In the process, the men have made beautiful baskets and become close friends.

Croes has labeled his and Carriere’s efforts “generation-ally-linked archaeology,” contending that their collaboration, which approaches basketry from different perspectives and temporal directions, is something new to the science. Croes’ focus is from deep-time forward, statistically tracing ancient traditions over the course of more than 4,000 years, while Carriere, as he studies the ancient basket styles and weaving techniques of archaeological samples, works from the present to the past. “All this helps explore my hypotheses where I explain on-going cultural continuity in three regions of the coast, ” said Croes.

Collaborating with Carriere was “probably the best idea I ever had,” Croes said. “Working with Ed and listening to how he described the various elements of the baskets, sharing our thoughts as we debated and questioned what we were seeing, gave me an entirely new perspective on ancient basketry technology.” And Carriere stated that his work would not be possible without the archaeological discoveries. “Having these artifacts to hold and study has opened the door to deep rooted cultural transmission, teachings through the generations, and showing how many of our Coast Salish traditions have continued to the present,” he said. “Traveling all over with Dale, to all these sites and conventions, I’m almost becoming an archaeologist myself,” he added with a laugh.

Around 1500 years ago, the Coast Salish peoples of southwestern British Columbia began to inter their dead within funerary petroforms. These burials, consisting of patterned arrangements of stone and soil built over the dead, marked a dramatic transition from below ground burials within the village, to above ground cemeteries located around village peripheries. This upward and outward movement of the dead is exemplified at the Rocky Point Peninsula on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island. It is one of the largest mortuary landscapes on the Northwest Coast of North America, with 515 visible funerary petroforms distributed within and between two large neighbouring cemeteries. Catherine Bell’s (1992) notion of ritualization challenges us to consider what the building of funerary petroforms accomplished that previous funerary practices did not. While funerals are times of grieving, they may also be ritual actions in which the dead are transformed from corpse to ancestor and the fami...

Households link micro and macro scales of social interactions, and both reflect and initiate social transformations , from the scale of the house to the region. Despite their potential interpretive efficacy, few studies scale up from interpretations of household dynamics to that of the larger social landscape. We examine local and regional social changes by documenting changing interactions between households at the large Sts'ailes-Coast Salish settlement of Hiqelem on the Harrison River. We focus on the period 1500 to 1000 years ago-a transformative period across the Pacific Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau marked by changes in burial practices, the in-tensification of warfare, new technologies, and by larger settlements exhibiting ranked social status. Shifts in house(hold) and settlement structure at Hiqelem reveal how these region-wide changes were manifest in social groupings at the local level and how social changes at the local level in turn reverberate throughout the nested social networks characteristic of the region. We detect several related changes at Hiqelem including an increased number of houses, the formation of local groups, the co-occurrence for the first time of pithouses and plank houses, the relocation of houses, increasing segmentation and autonomy of households, and significant differences among house sizes.

Este trabajo examina el concepto de centralización en el estudio de sociedades de pequeña escala, argumentando que el predominio de la noción antropológica de “Jefatura” y su énfasis en la centralización ha frenado el desarrollo de modelos
alternativos sobre organizaciones políticas descentralizadas. Usando los principios de autonomía local y estructuras de toma de decisiones descentralizadas como punto de partida, este artículo evalúa críticamente la relevancia teórica y empírica de las Jefaturas en relación a la organización política de los pueblos Coast Salish pasados y recientes del suroeste de Columbia Británica, Canadá. Los Coast Salish combinaron increíbles grados de afluencia (y disparidad en la afluencia), clases sociales formalizadas, y redes regionales ente elites en un enfoque organizacional que se conforma como una red
anárquica más que como un sistema político jerárquico. ¿Por qué sus políticas siguieron esta trayectoria? ¿Por qué las redes de relación entre elites en Coast Salish surgieron entre los 2000 y 1500 años atrás no reconfiguradas bajo un sistema con jerarquía regional? Desde una perspectiva diacrónica, describiré como los principios del anarquismo pueden ser usados para modelar la emergencia de sistemas políticos descentralizados y organizaciones sociales complejas carentes de políticas jerárquicas regionales.

En 1897, Pedro Kropotkin escribió un análisis histórico del desarrollo del Estado, en el que examinó cómo varias sociedades expresaron o reprimieron los principios centrales del anarquismo. Propongo que las bases de la metodología de Kropotkin para la historia provee una pauta para el análisis arqueológico. En este trabajo, discutiré la teoría anarquista y sus principios centrales para la organización social, incluyendo autonomía local, apoyo mutuo, redes heterárquicas, y descentralización. También describiré cómo estos principios y sus prácticas asociadas pueden manifestarse en patrones del registro arqueológico. Estos principios y prácticas no son estáticos, sino que son constantemente renegociados para direccional necesidades comunes en circunstancias y situaciones locales. Como caso de estudio, proveeré un análisis de la organización defensiva  en los Coast Salish de la Costa Noroeste de Norteamérica. Para describir sus sitios de defensa a escalas local y regional, contrastaré la interrelación entre apoyo mutuo / redes de alianzas (o cooperación) y expresiones de descentralización / resistencia a la concentración de poder o autoridad, donde movimientos hacia la cooperación muestran un ejercicio de autonomía y descentralización. Estos principios son operativos simultáneamente, pero la expresión tanto de alianzas como de resistencias depende de la escala de análisis. Para la región Coast Salish, encontré tales indicadores en una variedad de escalas, desde la familia extensa, pasando por familias extensas aliadas, comunidades, y redes inter-comunidades. Intentaré demostrar que su organización defensiva flexible permite que ocurran conflictos o alianzas en cada escala de la organización, en repuesta a la escala de la amenaza presentada. En este sentido, argumentaré que estos principios anarquistas de organización, así como son renegociados y varían a lo largo del tiempo, resultan en un cambio en los patrones, siendo éstos rastreables en el registro arqueológico.

In hunter-gatherer studies and the archaeology of small-to-intermediate scale societies, documenting the nature of changes in regional settlement is of considerable interest. The relationships among subsistence and social developments, technological innovations, and changing landscapes are often seen as complex and contextual, but also important to our understanding of history. In this talk I explore the character of temporal shifts in the social landscape of a substantial part of the Salish Sea, assessing seasonal land use through an understanding of place. Zooarchaeological analysis of a sample of thirty sites suggests that while extensive variation was characteristic of southern Strait of Georgia settlement from 3200 BC to contact with Europeans, late winter and early spring site use was prominent on southeastern Vancouver Island. The southern Gulf and San Juan Islands appear more generally to have been a focus of spring and summer inhabitation, especially between 650 BC and AD 650. Not only are the landscapes and seascapes of the past accessible from an environmental or economic perspective using regional site results, but aspects of the social relationships that were brought into being along with those places and pathways may also be revealed.

Published excerpts of open letter from Chief Ernest Cambell to Premier Christy Clark and Mayor Gregor Robertson dated 18 April 2012 regarding the treatment of Musqueam heritage and the "Marpole Midden."  //  Original letter available here: http://www.musqueam.bc.ca/sites/default/files/open_ltr_premier_mayor_marpole_april_18_2012_final_1.pdf

This is a podcast in an archaeological series conducted by members of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) in Ithaca, New York.  The discussion relates to questions from a talk given the previous day on applying Modes of Production analysis for anarchic societies; other discussion relates to the anarchism for the analysis of societies in the past as well as principles for collaborating with descendant communities in the present:

On September 18, 2015, Bill Angelbeck (Douglas College) met with a panel of CIAMS faculty (Kurt Jordan) and students (Kathleen Garland, Perri Gerard-Little, Samantha Sanft, and Erin Wright) to discuss the application of modes of production analysis to anarchic societies, focusing on the Pacific Northwest. The recorded discussion of about an hour opens below.

Link (also above):
http://ciams.cornell.edu/2015/10/01/radiociams-bill-angelbeck-on-modes-of-production-in-the-pacific-nw/