Douglas Osborne

Archaeological Investigations in the Chief Joseph Reservoir

Chief Joseph Reservoir is located along the Columbia River in southern Okanogan County,Washington (Fig. 108). The general area is a rugged highland, underlain chiefly by pre-Tertiary resistant rocks, and marked by welldefined north-south mountain ranges separated by broad troughs, now well dissected, into which the present main tributary streams, such as the Okanogan and the Sanpoil, have cut deep narrow trenches to the Columbia. The highland, whose summits reach 7000 and even 8000 feet at the international boundary, slopes rather uniformly south and passes beneath the broad expanse of the Columbia Plateau, where flat-lying mid-Tertiary basalt flows conceal the older rocks (Flint, 1935, p. 171). Along the river the country is rather barren of flora and fauna, except for sagebrush and an occasional clump of pine trees (Fig. 109, a ). Several miles north of the river the pine forests begin and extend north into Canada.

Western American Prehistory — An Hypothesis

RECENTLY I published a paper, together with Warren Caldwell and Robert Crabtree, disagreeing with an old theory that the development of most of Northwest Coast culture was due to movement of inland groups down the rivers to the seacoast where they proliferated physically and culturally (Osborne, Caldwell, and Crabtree 1956). We indicated (p. 117) that we did not propose to discard an old concept but suggested, rather, further evaluation and examination of alternate hypotheses, for we felt the reconstruction of Northwest Coast prehistory was only in the hypothesis stage. My conception of scientific advance may, perhaps because of personal idiosyncrasies of thought, confuse ideas with less abstract entities. Be that as it may, I see the increase of knowledge as an essentially irregular or jerky growth, marked by competition among ideas, hypotheses, and sometimes even bodies of data, which may be striving for general acceptance. This competition is a well-recognized attribute of our society; indeed, it is doubtful that science as we know it could have developed in the calmer, better organized, and better disciplined cultures which, if we may believe some of our colleagues, are more characteristic of man as a social animal than is our constant competition. If science among ourselves is inherently com. petitive, then it follows that at least a moderate intensity of competitiveness is necessary for its

Pottery in the Northwest

IN 1932 Verne F. Ray reported ethnographic data on the use of unfired pottery among the Sanpoil of the Plateau and discussed archaeological and ethnographic occurrences of both unfired and fired pottery in and adjacent to that area. He was disposed to look upon Sarci pottery as the most likely source for the Sanpoil trait. Since that time there has been an accumulation of further finds of clay items from the region. Taken individually these bits of data are perhaps worthy of small recognition but, as a group, they are beginning to assume proportions which suggest that the use of unfired, partly fired, or fired clay for numerous purposes may have been a Plateau-wide trait. I shall report here on such items as are known to me and which have become available since Rays paper. In addition to this a single piece of fired clay, a true potsherd, was found in 1956 in the collection of Harold Koethe of Battle Ground, Washington, by Alan Bryan, then a pipeline archaeologist. Bryan reports that the site, near the mouth of Salmon Creek, northwest of Vancouver, Cowlitz County, Washington, has seen a minimum of destructive digging and should be excavated. This sherd forms the main course as far as my factual offerings in this paper are concerned. I am grateful to Bryan for bringing the sherd to my attention. The photographs of the piece were done by E. F. Marten of the University of Washington Campus Studios (negatives 3605). My wife, Carolyn Osborne, enlarged the thinsection which was prepared for me through George E. Goodspeed.

Late Eskimo Archaeology in the Western Mackenzie Delta Area

A LTHOUGH the American Philosophical Society-University of New Mexico Mackenzie Valley Expedition of 1938 (Bliss, 1939, p. 365) was not primarily concerned with Eskimo archaeology, the members felt, while at the trading rendezvous Aklavik on the lower Mackenzie River, that the opportunity to run down to the Arctic coast was too obvious to be neglected. The archaeology of the Western Eskimo of the Mackenzie area has never been well studied; little, as a matter of fact, has been added since 1930 when Mathiassen wrote the introduction to his Western Eskimo report. This paper will add somewhat to a meager store of fact. During the nine-day trip, we examined ten Eskimo graves and five house sites as well as several miles of eroded and washed shore areas between Shingle Point and Blow River, Yukon Territory (Figure 13; see also Report, Canadian Arctic Expedition, Vol. 9, map). Here, the physiographic contrast is sharp between the Mackenzie delta and the high gravel and clay shores. These, eroded from the highlands inland, rise 100 to 150 feet above the sea. Local rivers are deeply incised in the unconsolidated material. The mouth of Blow River lies about 3 miles southeast from Shingle Point, along Shoalwater Bay. Here the water is saline, while only a short way on, toward the delta, the water is fresh because of the enormous volume of the Mackenzie.