An evolving revolution in wet site research on the northwest coast of North America

D. R Croes

Since 1950 AD, with the onset of larger-scale systematic archaeology on the southern Northwest Coast of North America, archaeologists have known that wet site deposits with perishable artefacts were occasionally encountered at the watertable depths of shellmidden excavations. The 1960s witnessed a testing of three large wet sites, Biderbost, Hoko River and Ozette Village. The 1970s represented a flowering of wet site exploration, with ten sites hydraulically excavated and reported in an overview conference volume. This peak decade of field investigations has been followed by attempts to incorporate the unique wet site data sets into the overall picture of Northwest Coast prehistory. Numerous surprises have arisen. The perishable artefacts demonstrate very contrary patterns of cultural evolution when compared with patterns represented by stone, bone and shell artefacts, causing a complete rethinking of the meaning of previously defined phase sequences along the Northwest Coast. The understanding of prehisioric economies and of the possible continuities of ethnic traditions has been greatly revised as well. Following England's Captain James Cook's visit to Nootka Sound on March 29, 1778, the Western world was first exposed to the unique and exceptionally rich hunter-fishergatherer cultures to be found along the Northwest Coast of North America (Fig. 12.1). Villages, or perhaps better termed towns, of thousands of people, with huge cedar plank houses, hundreds of large cedar dugout canoes, a stylized and large-scale art tradition, lived off efficient and intense fishing, hunting (including capture of even the largest mammal, the whale) and gathering of shellfish and plant foods. How these coastal people had evolved into the last remaining highly complex societies based solely on hunting, fishing and gathering fascinated the. earliest North American anthropologists, with considerable early ethnographic focus on recording their cultures. However the actual roots of this complexity could properly be approached only through archaeology, with one major problem: the majority of their often monumental structures, art and material culture was made of wood and fibre. In fact Philip Drucker, one of the first anthropologists to explore the archaeological potential in this area in the late 1930s, attributed the long neglect of archaeological research on the Northwest Coast to "the belief that the coastal sites are small and few, that they are poor in artifactual material, and that much of what material they contain is so poorly preserved ... as to be irrecoverable"

An evolving revolution in wet site research on the northwest coast of North America

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