Archaeology in Washington, Vol. 13, 2007 HOLOCENE SUBISTENCE AND SETTLEMENT PATTERNS: MOUNT RAINIER AND THE MONTANE PACIFIC NORTHWEST Greg C. Burtchard1 ABSTRACT landscapes, to prehistoric people, however, has only recently become widely recognized The last two decades have witnessed in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps because of increased interest regarding the role of elevation, unpredictable weather and rugged mountain landscapes in regional subsistence terrain, places like Mount Rainier have been and settlement systems, and the manner in regarded by many as marginal to subsistence which those systems changed through time. and settlement strategies that focused instead The 1998 report (revised 2003) Environment, on lowland settings east and west of the Prehistory and Archaeology of Mount Rainier Cascades. National Park, Washington deals with these issues as they apply to Mount Rainier, with The mountain locally known as Takhoma1 was implications for the Cascades generally. This renamed Mount Rainier by George Vancouver paper extracts key arguments from that report, during his Puget Sound explorations (Morgan updated and refined through recent research, 1979:8). It is the highest and most massive of to address long-term land-use processes as the stratovolcanos that form the eastern spine they apply to Mount Rainier and Cascade of the Cascade Range, which extend from Mt. landscapes; and to consider the capacity of Baker in northern Washington to Mt. Lassen the archaeological record to improve our in northern California. For at least the last understanding of these processes. This paper 75,000 years (Harris 1988:240), Rainier has first introduces Mount Rainier’s basic loomed above the surrounding western environmental characteristics, and addresses Cascade peaks, dominating the landscape the capacity of this, and other mountain from the Puget Trough to the Cowlitz River landscapes, to attract and sustain precontact valley on the west, and from the Kittitas to hunters and gatherers. Sections that follow Yakima valleys on the east. Owing to the discuss the forager to collector continuum as combined effects of elevation, mass, latitude it applies to the Pacific Northwest, and and position relative to Pacific westerlies, employs these principles to develop a Mount Rainier sustains the single largest Holocene subsistence and settlement model glacier system in the 48 contiguous states designed to fit Mount Rainier patterns into (Harris 1988:231). These glaciers are the larger regional land-use systems. source of several major Northwest rivers — the Nisqually, Mowich-Puyallup, Carbon, and INTRODUCTION White Rivers draining into Puget Sound; and the Ohanapecosh-Cowlitz system emptying Mount Rainier’s upper elevation landscapes into the Columbia River at Longview north of have been used seasonally by hunting and Portland. gathering people for most of the 8,500 to 9,500 years that the mountain has been free of Mount Rainier National Park forms an Pleistocene glacial ice. The importance of approximately square 235,612 acre box Mount Rainier, and other mountain around the mountain’s base; including the 1Mount Rainier National Park, Ashford, WA; [email protected] 3 Archaeology in Washington, Vol. 13, 2007. geologically older Tatoosh pluton peaks on its side-- (see Figure 2), Mount Rainier should northern and southern flanks, and the Cascade have been a particularly valuable resource crest to the east (Figure 1). Environmental procurement destination throughout much of characteristics vary with elevation, aspect, and the time that people have occupied the region. landform. Over the years, different taxonomic Assuming these resources did indeed attract systems have been employed to group these precontact people, Mount Rainier’s characteristics in the form of floral, principally archaeological record should preserve forest, composition (e.g., Brockman 1947; evidence of that use, distributed in greatest Franklin and Dyrness 1973; Moir 1989). For abundance in its more productive subalpine, our purposes, it is useful to modify these alpine and other early to mid seral stage systems slightly to accommodate vegetation- environments. resource zones of differential value to prehistoric people. For Mount Rainier, this The seasonal resource richness of upper can be accomplished in a four-part system that elevation landscapes has not always been includes 1) low to mid-elevation closed forest appreciated. Perhaps because mountains associations (here referred to as the Northwest appear to be remote, difficult-to-access places maritime forest) and associated river with severe winters, many have assumed that floodplains, 2) patchy subalpine parklands, 3) they were poorly suited to precontact human alpine tundra above tree-line, and 4) perpetual use in other than a cursory manner, or as snowfields and glaciers. barriers to be crossed on the way to somewhere else (cf., Mierendorf 1999:14-15). Mount Rainier’s environmental characteristics Ethnographic evidence to the contrary (Smith are important because they play a critical role 2006), presumed unimportance of high in conditioning the manner in which its elevation landscapes was implicit in the river landscapes were used during the prehistoric valley emphasis of Mount Rainier’s first past. Arguably, seasonal availability of formal archaeological survey (Daugherty economically important subsistence resources 1963), and lingered into the mid-1970s as constitutes the primary reason that people witnessed by statements alluding to the park’s used Mount Rainier during precontact times.2 limited potential for archaeological remains The most useful of these resources (e.g., (Bohannon 1974, 1975). mountain goats, elk, deer, marmots, bears, game birds, and huckleberries) tend to co- Since that time, the count of precontact occur in greatest abundance in subalpine, archaeological site locations at Mount Rainier, alpine, and other early- to mid-seral stage and in other mountain settings across the habitats wherever they occur. Accordingly, it Pacific Northwest, has climbed steadily. By is reasonable to expect precontact hunter- 2008, almost 100 site and isolated finds had gatherers to have favored these environments been documented in Mount Rainier National over more heavily forested, relatively Park (Figure 3) despite widespread presence resource-impoverished lower elevation slopes; of artifact -obscuring ground cover, repeated at least within the fishery-poor boundaries of volcanic deposits, and limited survey effort. Mount Rainier National Park. Consistent with patterned resource abundance on the mountain, most of these archaeological Because upper elevation subalpine and other properties are located in upper elevation early seral stage environments tend to be forest, subalpine and alpine settings. large, non-isolated, and widespread above 5,500 feet –especially on its drier northeastern 4 Archaeology in Washington, Vol. 13, 2007. Nisqually River Tatoosh Pluton N Cascade Crest White River Figure 1. Mount Rainier viewed from the northeast. Base map generated by Mount Rainier National Park GIS Office. Figure 2. Mount Rainier and sub-alpine parklands in Spray Park. Photo by author. 5 Archaeology in Washington, Vol. 13, 2007. Figure 3. 2008 Documented precontact Sites and environmental zones in Mount Rainier National Park. Map generated by Mount Rainier National Park GIS office. FORAGERS, COLLECTORS, AND time as well as variation across space. In the MOUNTAINS years since, many archaeologists have come to accept basic tenets of the forager-collector If we had better understood the resource model as modified and elaborated to qualities of mountain environments, and the accommodate organizational change through economies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers, time in patchy, temperate environments. In the archaeological community might not have essence, the model anticipates that, for ignored the importance of mountains to terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene precontact people for so long. In order to colonizing populations, the most effective better understand these issues, it is useful to economic strategy was one dominated by consider the manner in which precontact small, highly mobile foraging groups whose societies were organized and how they movement was determined largely by seasonal changed during the last 12,000 years or so. availability and productivity of locally obtainable subsistence and maintenance Lewis Binford (1980) developed basic resources. Human population density and elements of the forager-collector model to competition for available food resources were explain spatial variation in hunter-gatherer low. The relatively few foraging groups in the subsistence and settlement patterns in tropical region were relatively unencumbered in their environments. Schalk and Cleveland (1983) capacity to move to new hunting and extended these principles to the Pacific gathering places (including mountains) in Northwest; applying them to change through accordance with seasonal, or other, changes in 6 Archaeology in Washington, Vol. 13, 2007. the availability and abundance of their most principles to lay the groundwork for important resources. Storage needs were anticipating the nature of social and minimal and residential moves could be made archaeological changes by drawing attention by the entire social unit. It is reasonable to to 1) basic shifts in regional and montane expect use of high elevation landscapes by land-use practices through time, and 2) early Holocene foragers assuming the implications, if