South American Archaeology: History of Historic Archaeology in the Northwest

History of Historic Archaeology in the Northwest

Earliest work interested in fur trading posts
1. Many of these posts are now National Park Service interpretive centers
2. Work was aimed at locating placement of structures in the forts and recovery of artifacts illustrative of the lifeways for purposes of building the interpretive centers
  1. This continues to be an important part of what historic archaeology does.
3. On public lands there is a great deal of work being done to record mining sites, railroad sites, homesteads, bridges, roads/engineers history
4. Right now there is special interest in sites related to Lewis and Clark because of the coming bicentennial.

I show a video of a lecture Julie Stein gave at WSU about her work trying to locate empirical evidence for the location of Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark's Winter Camp along the Columbia. The video talks about her looking for their privy by trying to find high levels of mercury in soils.