Anthropology Commons^™

Transfer-Printed Gastroliths: Fowl-Ingested Artifacts And Identity At Fort Vancouver's Village, Emily C. Taber, Douglas C. Wilson, Robert Cromwell, Katie A. Wynia, Alice Knowles

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Transfer-printed ceramics and other objects ingested by fowl provide unique data on the household production associated with a fur-trade center in the Pacific Northwest. Gastroliths are an indicator of the use of avifauna at archaeological sites, specifically those of the order Galliformes. The presence of ceramic and glass gastroliths at house sites within Fort Vancouver's village provides evidence for the keeping and consumption of domestic fowl, including chickens and turkeys. The presence and concentration of these artifacts, combined with documentary and other evidence, provide clues about household economies in a culturally diverse colonial setting. While ethnic backgrounds of the villagers …

Building Wooden Houses: The Political Economy Of Plankhouse Construction On The Southern Northwest Coast Of North America, Kenneth M. Ames, Emily E. Shepard

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Household archaeology focuses on what households do. Building and repairing houses is a household task that receives less explicit attention than do other tasks. Through the lens of political economy, we examine how three southern Northwest Coast households organized and orchestrated a complex labor task: building and maintaining their houses, by developing estimates of labor and raw material costs. We then use this analysis to show how house building and maintenance bears on issues of collective action, monumentality, anthropogenic landscapes, the development of concepts of property on the Northwest Coast, and of household continuity across episodes of cultural change. The …

The Sablefish (Anoplopoma Fimbria) Of Čḯxwicən: Socioenvironmental Lessons From An Unusually Abundant Species, Reno Nims, Virginia L. Butler

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

We analyzed sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) remains from Čḯx^wicən (pronounced ch-WHEET-son), a 2700 year-old ancestral village of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in northwest Washington state, U.S.A., to improve understanding of how this species was used by Native American/First Nations peoples in the past. Though sablefish are abundant at Čḯx^wicən, and limited ethnographic accounts indicate they were highly prized in northwestern North America, their remains are rare in regional archaeology. We present a body-size regression model for estimating the fork length (FL) of archaeologically represented sablefish and determining which habitats they were captured from (i.e. shallow, nearshore …

The Čḯxwicən Project Of Northwest Washington State, U.S.A.: Opportunity Lost, Opportunity Found, Virginia L. Butler, Kristine M. Bovy, Sarah K. Campbell, Michael A. Etnier, Sarah L. Sterling

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Čḯx^wicən (pronounced ch-WHEET-son) is a 2700 year-old ancestral village of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (LEKT), located on the northwest coast of Washington State, U.S.A. The Čḯx^wicən project has scientific values that broadly contribute to research in human ecodynamics and maritime foragers, given the scale of the project, excavation methods, and enormous quantities of faunal materials recovered. The village holds great significance to the LEKT as their traditional village, which includes a sacred burial ground. The project began under challenging circumstances, when the village was inadvertently encountered during a construction project, incurring huge political, social and …

Using Bone Fragmentation Records To Investigate Coastal Human Ecodynamics: A Case Study From Čḯxwicən (Washington State, Usa), Kristine M. Bovy, Michael A. Etnier, Virginia L. Butler, Sarah K. Campbell, Jennie Deo Shaw

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Coastal shell middens are known for their generally excellent preservation and abundant identifiable faunal remains, including delicate fish and bird bones that are often rare or poorly preserved at non-shell midden sites. Thus, when we began our human ecodynamics research project focused on the fauna from Čḯx^wicən (45CA523, pronounced ch-WHEET-son), a large ancestral village of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, located on the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Port Angeles, Washington (USA), we anticipated generally high levels of bone identifiability. We quickly realized that the mammal bones were more fragmented and less identifiable than we …

Human Ecodynamics: A Perspective For The Study Of Long-Term Change In Socioecological Systems, Ben Fitzhugh, Virginia L. Butler, Kristine M. Bovy, Michael A. Etnier

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Human ecodynamics (H.E.) refers to processes of stability, resilience, and change in socio-ecological relationships or systems. H.E. research involves interdisciplinary study of the human condition as it affects and is affected by the rest of the non-human world. In this paper, we review the intellectual history of the human ecodynamics concept over the past several decades, as it has emerged out of classical ecology, anthropology, behavioral ecology, resilience theory, historical ecology, and related fields, especially with respect to the study of long-term socioecological change. Those who study human ecodynamics reject the notion that humans should be considered external to the …

Exploring Ecodynamics Of Coastal Foragers Using Integrated Faunal Records From Čḯxwicən Village (Strait Of Juan De Fuca, Washington, U.S.A.), Virginia L. Butler, Sarah K. Campbell, Kristine M. Bovy, Michael A. Etnier

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Extensive 2004 excavation of Čḯx^wicən (pronounced ch-WHEET-son), traditional home of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in northwest Washington State, U.S.A., documented human occupation spanning the last 2700 years with fine geostratigraphic control and 102 radiocarbon samples. Remains of multiple plankhouses were documented. Occupation spans large-magnitude earthquakes, periods of climate change, and change in nearshore habitat. Our project began in 2012 as a case study to explore the value of human ecodynamics in explaining change and stability in human-animal relationships on the Northwest Coast through analysis of faunal and geo-archaeological records. Field sampling was explicitly designed to allow for …

Building A Landscape History And Occupational Chronology At Čḯxwicən, A Coastal Village On The Strait Of Juan De Fuca, Washington State, U.S.A., Sarah K. Campbell, Sarah L. Sterling, Dennis E. Lewarch

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Geoarchaeological analysis at Čḯxwicən, an ancestral Klallam village near Port Angeles in northwestern Washington State, U.S.A., highlights the resilience of coastal foragers and their connection to place. Ancestral Klallam peoples occupied ever-changing beach and spit landforms growing within the shelter of Ediz Hook on the Strait of Juan de Fuca (SJDF) for 2700 years. Geoarchaeological methods were employed to define seven chronostratigraphic zones that chronologically structure the cultural deposits and allow them to be correlated to a sequence of beach development and to markers for tsunami that overtopped the site. Initial habitation prior to 1750 BP utilized a narrow beach …

Impacts Of Resource Fluctuations And Recurrent Tsunamis On The Occupational History Of Čḯxwicən, A Salishan Village On The Southern Shore Of The Strait Of Juan De Fuca, Washington State, U.S.A, Ian Hutchinson, Virginia L. Butler, Sarah K. Campbell, Sarah L. Sterling, Michael A. Etnier, Kristine M. Bovy

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A summed probability density function (spdf), generated from the catalog of 101 radiocarbon ages on wood and charcoal from the Čḯxwicən archaeological site (Washington State, USA), serves as a proxy for the site's occupational history over the last 2500 years. Significant differences between spdfs derived from a null model of population growth (a bootstrapped logistic equation) and the observed index suggest relatively less cultural activity at Čḯxwicən between about 1950–1750 cal BP, 1150–950 cal BP, and 650 to 550 cal BP; and increased activity between about 1350–1250 cal BP and 550–500 cal BP. Peaks in the Čḯxwicən spdf are closely …

Raven’S Work In Tlingit Ethno-Geography, Thomas F. Thornton, Douglas Deur, Bert Adams

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a chapter in Language and Toponymy in Alaska and Beyond: Papers in Honor of James Kari.

Book description:
It is difficult to imagine place names research in Alaska without the work of James Kari. Through his tireless field work and advocacy, Dr. Kari has collaborated with speakers of all of Alaska’s Dene languages to help build a comprehensive record of Dene geographic knowledge. When Jim came to Alaska in 1972, the documentation of Dene languages was fragmentary at best, and the only records of Native place names were those found inaccurately spelled on maps and gazetteers. Now …

The Radiocarbon Record Of The Western Stemmed Tradition On The Southern Columbia Plateau Of Western North America, Thomas Brown, Daniel Mcgowan Gilmour, Paul S. Solimano, Kenneth Ames

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The late Pleistocene–early Holocene archaeological record of the interior Pacific Northwest is dominated by what has been regionally referred to as the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). While various efforts have attempted to clarify the chronology of this tradition, these have largely focused on data from the Great Basin and have been disproportionately preoccupied with establishing the beginning of the tradition due to its temporal overlap with Clovis materials. Specifically focusing on the Columbia Plateau, we apply a series of Bayesian chronological models to create concise estimates of the most likely beginning, end, and span of the WST. We then further …

Effects Of Cultivation On Tuber And Starch Granule Morphometrics Of Solanum Jamesii And Implications For Interpretation Of The Archaeological Record, Nicole M. Herzog, Lisbeth A. Louderback, Bruce M. Pavlik

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Plant species native to the American southwest may have been cultivated by indigenous people, but techniques to assess the extent, timing, and impacts of early manipulation are lacking. Herein we apply morphometric techniques to tubers and starch granules of the Four Corners potato, (Solanum jamesii Torrey) to determine if cultivation, even over a relatively short period of time, can be detected. When compared to wild source plants, cultivated plants produced significantly larger tubers and starch granules. We suggest that, in concert with other archaeological and/or ecological data, microbotanical data may aid in identifying modifications to plant food resources related …

Human Settlement And Mid-Late Holocene Coastal Environmental Change At Cape Krusenstern, Northwest Alaska, Shelby Anderson, James Jordon, Adam Freeburg

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Archaeologists hypothesize that mid-late Holocene environmental variability played a role in several significant western Arctic cultural developments including population fluctuations, the evolution of Arctic maritime adaptations, and Arctic-wide migrations. Further evaluation of these hypotheses requires higher resolution archaeological and paleoecological datasets than are currently available. In response, we undertook an interdisciplinary study at Cape Krusenstern, a large coastal site complex in northwest Alaska, which was occupied over the last ca. 5000–6000 years. Our goals were to refine local cultural and paleoenvironmental chronologies and to explore the question of how local environmental change may have influenced local settlement history. The resulting …

The Galleon Cargo: Accounts In The Colonial Archives, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Esther González

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Much of the debris that has washed up on the shores of the northern Oregon coast for centuries were mainstays of Spanish trade carried as cargo across the world on Manila galleons. Both Native people and Euro-Americans have recovered large beeswax chunks, lending to the lore of the “Beeswax Wreck,” as well as Chinese blue-and-white porcelain fragments. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur describe research findings about cargo on the Santo Cristo de Burgos and similar Manila galleons, including the San Francisco Xavier of 1705, the previous favored candidate for the Oregon wreck. La Follette and Deur …

The Mountain Of A Thousand Holes: Shipwreck Traditions And Treasure Hunting On Oregon's North Coast, Cameron La Follette, Dennis Griffin, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

“Euro-Americans in coastal communities conflated and amplified Native American oral traditions of shipwrecks in Tillamook County, increasingly focusing on buried treasure,” write authors Cameron La Follette, Dennis Griffin and Douglas Deur. In this article, the authors trace the Euro-American blending of Native oral tradition with romances and adventure tales that helped create the “legends contributing to Neahkahnie [Mountain]'s reputation as Oregon's treasure-seeking haven.” They also examine the history of treasure-seeking in the area and describe the escalating conflict between Oregon's treasure-hunting statute and cultural resources protection laws, which led finally to statutory repeal that ended all treasure-hunting on state lands. …

Views Across The Pacific: The Galleon Trade And Its Traces In Oregon, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

From 1565 to 1815, Manila galleons such as the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship now thought to be the seventeenth century “Beeswax Wreck” that sank or ran aground near Nehalem Spit in Oregon — followed a 12,000-mile route from the Philippines through the stormy North Pacific, sometimes passing parallel to what is now the north Oregon coast, before reaching their destination in Acapulco, Mexico. The galleons were a central part of Spain's complex international commerce system, transporting people and Asian goods around the world. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur discuss the Spanish empire and …

The Galleon's Final Journey: Accounts Of Ship, Crew, And Passengers In The Colonial Archives, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Esther González

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Through archival research, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur document the history of the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship thought to be the Beeswax Wreck of Oregon — and its crew and passengers. The Santo Cristo “drew together a multiethnic crew of Spanish, Spanish Basque, Philippine, Mexican, and possibly African men in the most sprawling global trade network of their day.” Research conducted in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila and the Archivo General de la Nación of Mexico in Mexico City shows that the galleon left the …

Oregon's Manila Galleon, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Dennis Griffin, Scott S. Williams

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

For two centuries, physical evidence of a vast shipwreck, including beeswax and Chinese porcelain, has washed ashore in the Nehalem Spit area on the north coast of Oregon. The story of the wreck has been “shrouded by time, speculation, and surprisingly rich and often contradictory Euro-American folklore.” In this introduction to the Oregon Historical Quarterly's special issue, “Oregon's Manila Galleon,” authors Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Dennis Griffin, and Scott S. Williams summarize the rich archival findings and archaeological evidence that points to the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Manila galleon owned by the kingdom of Spain and bringing …

Greater Wealth Inequality, Less Polygyny: Rethinking The Polygyny Threshold Model, John Ziker

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea—based on the polygyny threshold model—that polygyny should be positively associated with wealth inequality. To address this polygyny paradox, we generalize the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model predicting the fraction of women married polygynously. We then demonstrate two conditions that are jointly sufficient to make monogamy the predominant marriage form, even in highly unequal societies. We assess if these conditions are satisfied using individual-level data from 29 human …

Assessing The Early Holocene Environment Of Northwestern Guyana: An Isotopic Analysis Of Human And Faunal Remains, Louisa Daggers, Mark G. Plew, Alex Edwards, Samantha Evans, Robin B. Trayler

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study used stable carbon δ¹³C and oxygen δ¹⁸O isotope compositions data to assess the extent to which diet breadths of northwestern Guyana changed during the Holocene. We analyzed human bone and enamel remains from seven shell mound sites dating between 7500 and 2600 BP. Our analyses demonstrate some degree of constancy in the availability of C₃ plants during the past several thousand years—though we note an increasing reliance on such plants beginning in the Early Holocene. We also document warming intervals during the Early Holocene (Early Archaic), which appear to correlate with dry periods …

Book Review Of, The Evolution Of Human Cooperation: Ritual And Social Complexity In Stateless Societies, Kenneth Ames

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviewed: The Evolution of Human Cooperation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies . CHARLES STANISH , 2017. Cambridge University Press , Cambridge . xiii + 336 pp. $110.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-107-18055-0. In this significant book, Stanish builds a model of how complex stateless societies solve collective action problems to benefit their members in the absence of coercive leadership--not in the absence of leadership but in the absence of coercive leadership. The model is framed by game theory, which is recast as anthropological game theory, and collective action theory, making the claim that humans are conditional cooperators. Crucial to successful …

Variation In Wealth And Educational Drivers Of Fertility Decline Across 45 Countries, Heidi Colleran, Kristin Snopkowski

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Fertility decline in human populations is an inherent evolutionary puzzle with major demographic, socio-cultural and evolutionary consequences. The individual level predictors of fertility decline are numerous, but the way these effects vary by country and how they are causally mediated by other factors has received relatively little attention. Here we take a multilevel approach to compare similarities and differences in the primary predictors of contemporary fertility declines—wealth and education—across 45 countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data collected from 2003 to 2015. We use multilevel models …

An Efficient And Reliable Dna-Based Sex Identification Method For Archaeological Pacific Salmonid (Oncorhynchus Spp.) Remains, Thomas C.A. Royle, Dionne Sakhrani, Camilla F. Speller, Virginia L. Butler, Robert H. Devlin, Aubrey Cannon, Dongya Y. Yang

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Pacific salmonid (Oncorhynchus spp.) remains are routinely recovered from archaeological sites in northwestern North America but typically lack sexually dimorphic features, precluding the sex identification of these remains through morphological approaches. Consequently, little is known about the deep history of the sex-selective salmonid fishing strategies practiced by some of the region's Indigenous peoples. Here, we present a DNA-based method for the sex identification of archaeological Pacific salmonid remains that integrates two PCR assays that each co-amplify fragments of the sexually dimorphic on the Y chromosome (sdY) gene and an internal positive control (Clock1a or D-loop). The first assay coamplifies a …

Neahkahnie Mountain, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Neahkahnie Mountain, about twenty miles south of Seaside, is a prominent landmark in Oregon Coast geography, history, and lore. Standing 1,680 feet high, the basalt edifice is both a peak and a headland. Formed by Miocene lava flows surging down the ancestral Columbia River channel roughly 15 million years ago, the mountain’s western face has been eroded by ocean waves, forming precipitous cliffs that drop as far as six hundred feet to the churning Pacific below. The mountain’s upper and north-facing slopes are draped in a dense and expanding forest of Sitka spruce, Western hemlock, and Western red …

Indigenous Siberian Food Sharing Networks: Social Innovation In A Transforming Economy, John P. Ziker, Karen S. Fulk

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. A social food-sharing network within the Ust’-Avam community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia is analyzed for underlying patterns of resilience and key evolutionarily stable strategies supporting cooperative behavior. Factors influencing the network include interhousehold relatedness, reciprocal sharing, and interaction effects. Social association also influences sharing. Evidence for multiple determinants of food sharing in this sample is discussed in reference to major evolutionary hypotheses and comparable studies. In sum, the findings illustrate the robustness of self-organizing …

Naming Brazil's Previously Poor: “New Middle Class” As An Economic, Political, And Experiential Category, Charles H. Klein, Sean T. Mitchell, Benjamin Junge

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The early years of the 21st century were historic for socioeconomic relations in Brazil. While long known for stark socioeconomic inequality, the nation became internationally celebrated for its economic growth and successful poverty-reduction initiatives, which together propelled some 35 million “previously poor” Brazilians into what became called a “new middle class.” The apparent rise of this “new” class has generated contentious debates and a range of social science studies in Brazil; yet this literature is little known in the Anglophone academic world. While some have interpreted this demographic transformation as an expansion of the existing middle class, others have questioned …

Book Review Of, Figures In Buddhist Modernity In Asia, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a book review of, Figures in Buddhist Modernity in Asia. Jeffrey Samuels, Justin Thomas McDaniel, and Mark Michael Rowe, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. ISBN 9780824858544

Respect The Land - It’S Like Part Of Us: A Traditional Use Study Of Inland Dena’Ina Ties To The Chulitna River & Sixmile Lake Basins, Lake Clark National Park And Preserve, Douglas Deur, Karen Evanoff, Jamie Hebert

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

For countless generations, Lake Clark has been home to the inland Dena’ina people. This unique and vast fresh-water lake complex sits at the intersection of sprawling tundra, taiga, and jagged cordillera, dotted with villages. Here, village life has been sustained by herds of caribou, shorelines populated by moose and beaver, vast runs of salmon ascending from Bristol Bay, and other natural assets. But the area’s uniqueness extends beyond its abundant natural resources. Also unique is the National Park Service (NPS) unit that has occupied the region known as Lake Clark National Park and Preserve (LACL) in recent decades.

The study …

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Evolutionary Models Of Culture Change, Cameron M. Smith, Liane Gabora, William Gardner-O’Kearney

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is beginning to fulfill the whole promise of Darwinian insight through its extension of evolutionary understanding from the biological domain to include cultural information evolution. Several decades of important foundation-laying work took a social Darwinist approach and exhibited ecologically-deterministic elements. This is not the case for more recent developments to the evolutionary study of culture, which emphasize non-Darwinian processes such as self-organization, potentiality, and epigenetic change.

Two Cognitive Transitions Underlying The Capacity For Cultural Evolution, Liane Gabora, Cameron M. Smith

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper proposes that the distinctively human capacity for cumulative, adaptive, open-ended cultural evolution came about through two temporally-distinct cognitive transitions. First, the origin of Homo-specific culture over two MYA was made possible by the onset of a finer-grained associative memory that allowed episodes to be encoded in greater detail. This in turn meant more overlap amongst the distributed representations of these episodes, such that they could more readily evoke one another through self-triggered recall (STR). STR enabled representational redescription, the chaining of thoughts and actions, and the capacity for a stream of thought. Second, fully cognitive modernity following the …