Appendix H - Historical Archaeological and ... - CBP.gov

pits in small numbers, usually one to three of various sizes and shapes containing diverse tool
assemblages. Occasionally houses contain storage pit features and abundant hopper-mortar
bases, suggesting a level of sedentism where resources were abundant yet entailed substantial
processing. During the later Holocene pit houses often increased in diameter and depth, and the
complexity of housefloor and associated midden stratigraphy grew. Large villages of numerous
house pits along the lower reaches of larger rivers characterize the archaeological record of the
past 2,000 years, although the numbers of pits within villages (and inferred human population)
decrease during the roughly 1,200 years prior to Euroamerican contact. Post-depostional
processes are the most critical factor in preservation and visibility of archaeological pithouse
remains. Housepit sites may be visible on the ground surface of stable landforms that have been
relatively unaffected by erosion or deposition over the past several millennia, such as older river
terraces. Infilling of house pits after abandonment, especially of those along rivers depositing
large volumes of sediment along their banks, in areas exposed to sustained aeolian
sedimentation, and places within volcanic ashfall zones that accumulate tephra deposits, may
deeply bury the remains of housepits.
Other kinds of prehistoric archaeological sites that occur within the PEIS zone in this region
include a variety of resource processing features and lithic reduction sites. Artifacts and features
associated with plant and fish processing are often found within and around the remains of
houses; however, such materials are also identified unassociated with the remains of dwellings in
places of high resource abundance. Pit features containing calcined salmon bones found along
rivers are often associated with fishing gear such as netweights and processing tools such as
ground stone knives. Freshwater mussel shell middens are often exposed along eroding
riverbanks. Camas ovens are a notable archaeological feature of the Calispell Valley, comprised
of dense buried deposits of fire-modified cobbles, charcoal-rich sediments, and often the charred
remains of camas bulbs (Thoms, 1989). Other archaeological features indicative of Native
American activity that may be found in isolation include rock cairns along ridgelines and talus
slope burials on the flanks of hills and mountains.
Several archaeological complexes have been identified that are defined by nearly continuous
distributions of features, lithic artifacts, and house remains that, when interpreted as a whole,
present a picture of long-term occupation of the landscape and abundant data on changing land
use patterns. An Archaeological District on the Upper Pend Oreille River (Miss, 2004) in Idaho
typifies this kind of site complex, as do districts in Washington that have undergone intensive
archaeological investigation: Lake Roosevelt above the Grand Coulee Dam (Chatters, 1984), the
Lake Pateros reservoir (Chatters, 1986), the Spokane River, the Kettle River in the vicinity of
Kettle Falls (Chance and Chance, 1985), in the Calispell Valley (Thoms and Burtchard, 1986),
and sites near Chief Joseph Dam and Rufus Woods Lake reservoir (Campbell, 1985).
Prehistoric Chronological Sequence
Several published culture-historical sequences aid in the identification and interpretation of the
archaeological record of the Plateau Culture Area within the PEIS zone. The designations of
chronological periods, their characteristics, and their implications for the archaeological record
in the PEIS zone are summarized in a very general fashion in this section. The periods used here
include the Early, Middle, and Late Periods as generalized by Chatters and Pokotylo (1998). The
divisions between the broad periods follow environmental changes as well as patterns of human
land use: the end of the Pleistocene epoch and the early Holocene (ca. 12,000 B.P.-8,000 B.P.),
Northern Border Activities H-64 July 2012