The Forest Homestead Act of 1906 precipitated one of the final rushes for free
land in American history. A nascent land management agency, the USDA Forest
Service, created a systematized process for the review and documentation of purported
forest homestead claims. One hundred years later, the forest-homestead examination
files of...
A cultural landscape analysis of two historic cemeteries in St. Paul, Oregon demonstrates that the residents of this early community were unknowingly using grave markers to express their worldview and the identities that they felt were most important. Because of the historical and cultural development of this community as the...
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...
In 1986, researchers from Oregon State University, led by Dr. David Brauner, came to the small Catholic community of St. Paul, Oregon as part of ongoing research on the French-Canadian inhabitants of the Willamette Valley between 1829 and the mid-1860s. They were searching for the remains of the first Catholic...
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...
In 1976-77 and 2010, Oregon State University (OSU) excavated portions of the enlisted men’s barracks and privy at Fort Hoskins, a Civil War-era fort. In operation from 1856 to 1865, this fort served as part of a security network to protect and monitor the recently created Coast Indian Reservation. The...
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...
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...
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...
This thesis is based on the excavations of the Robert Newell farmstead (35MA41), excavated in 2002 and 2003 by the Oregon State University Department of Anthropology archaeological field school. Robert Newell lived at this farm from 1843- 1854. Major architectural features, including a brick hearth and postholes were discovered at...