March 6, 2001
Finding fragments of the Northwest’s past
Long before dot-com millionaires and wealthy Californians rediscovered the San Juan Islands as an ideal place to build fancy summer homes, the Coast Salish people inhabited the area for more than 11,000 years. But little visible evidence remains of their long occupation of the land.
For nearly two decades University of Washington anthropology professor Julie Stein has been searching for clues about the islands’ earliest residents and explaining to curious Puget Sound residents what scientists have learned.
Spurred by continuing public interest in the state’s early residents and a fascination with what archaeologists do, Stein has written a new book “Exploring Coast Salish Prehistory, The Archaeology of San Juan Island,” published by the University of Washington Press. This is no fancy coffee table volume about the wonders uncovered by archaeologists. Rather it is a tale explaining how archaeologists go about their work of reconstructing the past and what has been discovered about the people of San Juan Island prior to European contact.
Stein, who is a curator of archaeology at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and divisional dean of computing, facilities and research for the UW College of Arts and Sciences, directed the last major dig on San Juan Island. From 1983 to l991, she directed a UW archaeology field school at English Camp, one of two sites discussed in her book.
She is fond of saying archaeology “is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing the picture and without all the pieces. To accomplish this we have to search hard for all the pieces. In the Pacific Northwest that search is looking for the artifacts that can survive decomposition, and asking Native Americans living in the area today about their heritage.”
There are two key reasons why anthropologists know less about the prehistoric (before Euro-American contact) past of the Northwest than of other regions of the United States, according to Stein.
“First, the Northwest culture at the time of contact with Euro-Americans was so rich in woven and carved objects and these objects were so desirable that everyone scrambled to acquire the marvelous things for museums. Second is the dominance of perishable goods, objects made out of wood or woven from fiber materials. These materials decompose very quickly in this climate. Compare this to the Southwest, where there were rock houses and pottery that left a durable prehistoric record, and you can see why archaeologists did not conduct many excavations in this region.”
Stein and other archaeologists did find nearly 100,000 prehistoric and historic artifacts – most of them shells, charcoal and fish bone – at English Camp and Cattle Point on San Juan Island. Cattle Point was a summer camp occupied for about 4,000 years where people fished and harvested shellfish prior to European contact. English Camp was a winter village site used by native people for about 2,000 years up to the historic period.
These artifacts and other work by archaeologists reveal a fragmentary image of the island’s early inhabitants. But much has disappeared on the island and throughout western Washington, as the result of nature and development.
“We know Paleo-Indian people were in Eastern and Western Washington,” said Stein. “Two or three Clovis points (stone blades used by people around 11,500 years ago) were found in Puget Sound. But the record is hard to find here because of the present dense forest cover and erosion and sea-level fluctuations that occurred when glaciers retreated 13,000 years ago. It also may be that the best places to find evidence are covered by concrete and condos and are lost.
“I know we have lost many sites in the San Juan Islands and many more are going fast on private property where owners are scraping away the archaeological record. It is hard to get people excited about saving them. The evidence is a subtle thing to the general public, if you picture something like a monument or a pyramid. The things we are interested in here, shells, animal bones and broken tools, pale by comparison. We know there are other sites like Cattle Point in the San Juans because people tell us about things their neighbors have found on their property.”
Stein would like nothing more than to save and investigate those sites, perhaps adding new chapters to the Northwest’s fragmentary prehistoric record.
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For more information, contact Stein at (206) 616-7519 or jkstein@u.washington.edu
