The Archaeology of The Dalles Area: Precontact Settlement and Subsistence

to be published somewhere soon...

The Archaeology of The Dalles Area: Precontact Settlement and Subsistence
by Paul S. Solimano and Daniel M. Gilmour

Introduction

The stretch of the Columbia River around The Dalles, Oregon, holds a special position in Pacific Northwest anthropology. Before twentieth century hydropower development, the Columbia River was recognized as one of the greatest salmon-producing rivers in the world (Butler and O’Connor 2004; Northwest Power Planning Council 2000), with the ten mile stretch between The Dalles and the mouth of the Deschutes River a foremost North American precontact Native fishery. (Butler and O’Connor 2004; Netboy 1980) (Figure 1). Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts detail large, dense populations, villages, and complex seasonal movements (DeSmet 1978; Moulton 1991; Stern 1998; Wilkes 1844). Records show the area was the center of an extensive travel and trade network connecting people from as far away as the Pacific coast, Canada, California, and the Bitterroot Mountains (Anastasio 1972; Hayden and Schulting 1997; Stern 1998). Intensive fishing with complex systems of rights and access is also documented (Boyd 1996; French 1961; French and French 1998; Spier and Sapir 1930). Ninety years of archaeological work, albeit with varying degrees of professionalism, has revealed numerous large, dense sites with deposits spanning the Holocene and containing some of the most extraordinary precontact material culture known on the Columbia Plateau (Minor 1988a, 1988b). 

As a result, Northwest archaeologists have generally viewed The Dalles area as having some of the most complex cultural systems on the Plateau during the precontact period (Ames et al. 1998; Butler 1993; Hayden and Schulting 1997; Minor 1988b, 1988c, 2012). Minor (1988c:76) succinctly expresses the common view among archaeologists when he states:  

“If the assumption is accepted that elaboration in material culture in the form of wealth items, mortuary goods, and portable and rock art are intimately associated with social organization and ideological systems, then the level of cultural complexity in the Dalles-Deschutes area was higher than in any other area of the Columbia Plateau in prehistoric times, perhaps rivaling the classic cultures of the Northwest Coast.”

Despite this special place in the region and a large number of recorded sites, numerous and sometimes vast excavations and staggering numbers of collected artifacts, our understanding of precontact settlement and subsistence for The Dalles area remains nearly non-existent. 

Figure 1. Configuration of The Dalles area and location sites discussed in the text.   

Select archaeological information has been used for regional studies (e.g., Hayden and Schulting 1997; Minor 2013), but archaeologists lack a usable, local chronological framework for the area. Descriptions of precontact mobility and social organization are unknown. Aside from evidence of fishing about 9,000 years ago and intensive fishing at contact, our grasp of precontact subsistence practices is superficial at best. Overall, archaeologists’ knowledge of The Dalles area prehistory beyond the ethnographic period consists almost exclusively of a few, disconnected (albeit important and fascinating), and often repeated facts, linked by a broad web of conjecture and assumption. 

Reasons for this ignorance are manifold. The quality of older work is a major factor, with coarse, inexact field methods and particularistic, highly selective reporting. More recent archaeological work also has shortcomings, some of which result from the nature of compliance archaeology: limited-scale evaluative test excavations as opposed to larger-scale data recovery and work focused on smaller sites with fewer data categories away from the Columbia mainstem. Despite these structural issues, two additional problems with more recent archaeological work are obvious. First, recent work in The Dalles area lacks a coherent research framework. Early work suffered from a range of problems, but most was undertaken with certain aims in mind, while the archaeological goals of most current work are unclear. That is, much compliance work focuses on collecting and describing data, but displays little interest in how that data could be used. Second, older and more recent archaeological work is not truly integrated. Rather, recent archaeological work relies almost entirely on highly generalized summaries of earlier work, with important facts culled and presented in isolation. 

We maintain integrating older and more recent work into some type of coherent research framework is paramount to actually beginning to understand the precontact period in The Dalles area beyond an intuitive level. In this paper, we synthesize older and more recent work to organize what we currently know about The Dalles area archaeologically and provide a structure for future archaeological research. This paper presents an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from archaeological excavation projects in the area. The data is compared to three dimensions of hunter-gather land-use: site function, subsistence, and lithic tool diversity, and used as the basis for a diachronic model of precontact land-use for The Dalles vicinity.

This paper does not completely review archaeological work in The Dalles area, provide a culture historical synopsis or summarize excavated sites. The reader is directed to Minor 1988a and 1988b for comprehensive and invaluable reviews of the area’s archaeological work. This paper also does not make use of the area’s rich ethnographic record. There are two reasons for this. First, a primary goal of this effort is to focus on and maximize the use of an underused and underexplored data set: the area’s archaeological record. Second, archaeological and ethnographic data can be complimentary, but are in fact different types of data (Ames 1991; Campbell 1991; Dewar and McBride 1992). As such, ethnohistoric and archaeological data can often most profitably focus on different types of questions, at different scales. Archaeological data is also derived from compliance activities at great cost to the public and should provide unique insights into the past that are unobtainable from other sources. 

This paper is organized into five basic parts. The first introduces the paper and its goals. The second presents a brief review of local research directions and issues. The third section presents our research framework and methods. The fourth section presents analysis of the three dimensions of land-use examined. The analysis of each dimension begins with a brief overview of how the dimension has been treated previously in local research, followed by a discussion of the dimension-specific analytic methods and the analysis. This analysis consists of a quantitative and qualitative section. The fourth section also presents some broad observations on excavation strategies. The fifth section synthesizes the data into a model of precontact land-use for The Dalles area and presents final observations.