Get Outdoors - Destinations: Archeology of North Cascades

Though it will be a long time before the complete story of human use of the North Cascades can be told, the following sections summarize what has been learned from recent archeological studies in this most scenic and rugged of Washington''s mountainous landscapes.Most of the archeological sites in the park consist of the below-ground remains of camps, villages, and resource use areas where Indian people processed and cooked food, collected specific kinds of rocks and minerals for tools, and hunted, fished, and collected plants. Some sites have above-ground remains, and appear as rockshelters, rock art, bark-stripped trees, rock features, and pits dug into the ground. A much smaller number of sites reflect historic-period, non-Indian settlement and exploration, especially mining.

Prehistoric Artifact and Feature Types.
A wide array of tool types and features have been found in archeological sites. Chipped stone tools include: spear, dart, and arrow points; knives; scrapers; drills; gravers; microblades and microblade cores; and simple flake tools. Stylistically, these suggest that Native groups in the North Cascades maintained direct or indirect relationships with groups widespread in the foothills and non-mountainous lands surrounding the northern Cascade Range. Ground stone tools include: adz blades; slate knives; soapstone pipe bowls, one effigy, and decorative pieces; pestles and manos; and abrading tools and hammerstones. A few broken bone awl or harpoon tips have been found at one site.Other remains, called "features" by archeologists, include living floors at camps, food-cooking pits and hearths, sweat lodges, salmon smoking and drying sites, vision quest locations, hunting blinds, and food storage locations. The oldest dated feature in the park complex is a subalpine campfire area dated at 5,400 years old (calibrated to calendar years using dendrochronology). Overall, the combined inventory of artifacts and features indicates extensive use of mountain landscapes for hunting, gathering, and fishing purposes, including the processing, cooking, and working of a wide variety of local resources.

With few exceptions, the artifact assemblages from throughout the park complex are dominated by utilitarian remains. These remains reflect the procurement, manufacturing, and processing of the numerous locally-derived resources provided by the mountain environment. Compared to artifacts from archeological assemblages from non-mountainous environments, one is left with the impression that people in the North Cascades wasted little and tended to discard tools only after they had become worn out. These early people certainly traveled light by today''s standards, and without the benefit of maintained trail systems of the present; they lived through climatic events that we have never experienced and at a scale that we are only now becoming aware of. In small groups these early people appear to have moved freely across all parts of the mountain landscape.

Faunal and Floral Remains.
Often in the excavation of archeological sites, the remains of animals and plants used by the sites'' inhabitants are found. Due to the moist, maritime climate, which accelerates decay processes, and the acidic mountain soils, organic remains are rarely preserved. To date, the best preservation environment, surprisingly, is in cooking hearths and other features where organic remains become charred, but not completely burned. Like charcoal, such charred remains are chemically quite stable and can remain in the soil for thousands of years.

Animals, used for food and utilitarian purposes, have been recognized from remains found in a few hearths. These include beaver (Castor canadensis), mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus), elk (Cervus), deer (Odocoileus hemionus), dog or wolf (Canis), black bear (Ursus americanus), and snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus). Other animal remains cannot be identified to the species level, but to a more general taxonomic level. Thus, we have found numerous bones from birds, small mammals, and salmonid fish. One site that marks a fish smoking and drying location, dated 660 to 170 years old, contains thousands of bones (spines, vertebrae, and teeth) of Salmonids of as yet undetermined species.Plant remains are preserved in sites as charred fragments or sometimes complete specimens. At a site along the Skagit River dating to 475 radiocarbon years old, dozens of charred red elderberry seeds (Sambucus racemosa) were identified from a cooking hearth. Most of the charred remains from archeological features appear to be woody parts of trees and shrubs used for fuel. However, a 3,000 year old campsite in the Stehekin Valley suggests tat wood was intentionally procured and prepared for some as yet unknown use. At this site, a split board of the yellow pine group (probably Pinus ponderosa) was dated to 450 years old. From the same site, charred branches identified as Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) were found within a cooking hearth and were dated to 1,410 radiocarbon years old.

Shell remains are rarely found from park complex sites, the single exception being a complete Dentalium shell recovered from the 1,350 year old Newhalem Rockshelter. Dentalium is a sea shell found in sand and mud habitats under 6 to 500 feet of water along the Pacific coast. It was highly valued by Native peoples and was used throughout the Pacific Northwest as a form of currency.

Stone Procurement and Use
The North Cascades provided an incredible array of stone raw materials that were used by Native groups for tools and other utilitarian needs. These stone materials include varieties of quartz called "chert", slate, argillite, serpentine, quartz crystal, soapstone, and vitrophyre.

In the northern portion of the North Cascades, numerous chert quarries have been found, marking the places where chert fragments were hammered from bedrock outcrops and glacial boulders. Artifacts made of this Hozomeen chert have been found as far east as Lake Chelan and as far west as Puget Sound. In another part of the park complex, far removed from the chert quarries, are found alpine and subalpine vitrophyre quarries. Although generally poor in quality, this distinctive material has been used for at least the last 5,400 years.

Varieties of high quality obsidian also appear in archeological sites of the park complex. Chemical analysis of these varieties indicates that they are derived from sources far to the south and east, in today''s northern California, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming. We can now say with certainty that Native inhabitants of the North Cascades participated in a broad, intra-regional trade network, through which they procured high quality obsidians from such volcanic terrains as Newberry Crater, Glass Butte, the Three Sisters, Whitewater Ridge, and Obsidian Cliffs, all in central and eastern Oregon; from Timber Butte in eastern Idaho; and from Obsidian Cliffs in today''s Yellowstone National Park.

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