Excavations performed at the historic Smith House (ORYA3) located in
Dayton, Yamhill County, Oregon, recovered a large collection of artifacts. Categories
of artifacts previously analyzed include flat glass, nails, glass containers, ceramic
hollowware and flatware, brick, bone, metal containers, illumination devices,
currency, footwear, tobacco, and lead balls, shot, and cartridge...
For centuries humans have been searching for precious metals. The search for gold has greatly changed the landscape of the American West, beginning in the 1850s and continuing today. Various gold rushes around the country created mining colonies in remote areas, thereby connecting the frontier with the rest of America...
The Coast Reservation of Oregon was established under Executive Order of President Franklin Pierce in November, 1855, as a homeland for the southern Oregon tribes. It was an immense, isolated wilderness, parts of which had burned earlier in the century. There were some prairies where farming was possible, but because...
By examining the combined written, ethnographic and physical evidence of a surviving
steam-powered sawmill in the Douglas-fir region of the Pacific Northwest, this thesis
seeks to supply new insights into the operation and adaptability of antiquated machinery
during a period of rapid social and technological change and to develop a...
Red Light Ladies presents a perspective on prostitution in North America, within the context of the western mining frontier. A biographical profile of the frontier
prostitutor is presented, along with an archaeological model of settlement patterns and material culture. Settlement patterns and demographic changes in the prostitutor
population are hypothetically...
Approximately 5,500 years ago a discreet period of
wetter and cooler environmental conditions prevailed
across the southern Columbia Plateau. This period was
marked by the first prominent episodes of erosion to occur
along the lower Snake River following the height of the
Altithermal and eruption of Mt. Mazama during the...
Using the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) this thesis shows that entomological information and material can be retrieved using current historical archaeological methods. Historical archaeology has the ability to uncover connections between arenas as varied, and seemingly isolated, as the honey bee, the environment, and human cultures. By focusing on...
Although the timber industry was the major economic force in the lives of several generations of Oregon families, very little archaeological investigation has been done on the dozens of abandoned logging camps that are scattered throughout the forests of the Pacific Northwest. This project focuses on Camp 1, a 1920s...
There is a widespread problem with looting and vandalism of cultural resources in the Pacific Northwest. To combat this problem law enforcement must have the assistance of the archaeological community. To be able to assist law enforcement, archaeologists and cultural resource specialists must have the proper training in cultural resource...
Human settlement patterns are the ways in which people locate themselves over the terrain in their area of occupation. Settlement pattern prediction attempts to define and understand the factors in culture, technology, and environment that shape the spatial distribution of habitation sites for a given group of people. A systematic...
The portion of the Oregon coast extending from Cape Blanco south into California has long been recognized as a distinct physiographic region, with probable ramifications for prehistoric subsistence and settlement patterns. Several researchers have proposed models outlining a greater reliance upon marine/littoral resources among groups within this region, while more...
This thesis examines archaeological material in order to explore gender and ethnicity issues concerning fur trade era families from a settlement in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Ethnohistorical information consisting of traders journals and travelers observations, as well as documentation from the Hudson's Bay Company, Catholic church records, and genealogical information...
The United States Forest Service's Passport In Time program is designed to involve the public in archaeology on National Forest land. Three of the program's goals are: 1) allow archaeologists to conduct research they would not otherwise have the time or the budget to conduct; 2) teach the public about...
St. Joseph's College was located within St. Paul, Oregon, the first Roman Catholic mission in the Pacific Northwest. The St. Paul mission was finally established in 1839 by Father Francois Blanchet, four years after the French-Canadian settlers in the area, appropriately known as French Prairie, had requested the presence of...
Cultural resource inventories have identified,205 individual sites
on public land along the Lower Salmon River, Idaho. These sites
represent a rich and diverse record of the human occupation and
utilization of the river canyon during the past 10,000 years. Each
of these 205 sites contains its own unique record of...
This thesis describes the archaeological site content and integrity of the Copeland site (35BE90) in Corvallis, Oregon. The Copeland site is owned by the Benton County Historical Society and is the future home of the Benton County Historical Museum. In 2001, an Oregon State University archaeological field school was conducted...
Champoeg, located along the Willamette River, developed
as a transportation center for both river and overland
travel and as a shipping point for agricultural products.
Retired employees of the Hudson's Bay Company were the first
to settle in the area, in the 1830s. American settlers
began arriving in large numbers...
End scrapers were an "all purpose" tool that have been associated with processes such as planing or shaving vegetal resources, shaping bone or antler implements, and to render hide into usable fabric. Examining end scrapers from four different archaeological sites on the North Umpqua River of southwestern Oregon provided interesting...
Over the past 42 years clay smoking pipes have been excavated from two U.S. army posts, Fort Hoskins (35BE15) and Fort Yamhill (35PO75) and curated at Oregon State University. These two forts were established in Western Oregon in 1856 and by 1866 both had been decommissioned. Numerous theses have focused...
During the summer of 2016, Oregon State University conducted preliminary excavations of the hospital at Fort Yamhill, Oregon (35PO75). Fort Yamhill (1856-1866), has long been a focus of OSU’s field schools, offering glimpses into garrison life through the eyes of the officers and the enlisted men. However, up until recently,...