Chinook Salmon,Late Holocene Climate Change,and the Occupational History of Kettle Falls,a Columbia River Fishing Station

ABSTRACT

Kettle Falls, located 1125?km from the mouth of the Columbia River in present-day Washington State (USA), was the second-most important salmon fishing and trading locus on that river in the early historic era. We encapsulate the late Holocene history of the fishery by deriving a summed probability distribution function (SPDF) from 50 radiocarbon ages from 13 archaeological sites within 2?km of the falls. When compared to an SPDF from 307 sites from elsewhere on the Columbia Plateau, and a null model, the Kettle Falls SPDF exhibits two phases of elevated activity at 1700–1300?cal BP and 800–500?cal BP, and an intervening lull. These phases are not related to the excavation history or differential exposure of sites to taphonomic processes, but they are concordant with episodes of glacial advance in the local mountains, which reflect hemispheric-scale changes in climate. Modern returns of summer-run Chinook salmon to the Columbia River are inversely correlated with sea-surface temperature regimes in the northeast Pacific Ocean, and we propose that the occupational history of the Kettle Falls fishery echoes long-term variations in the returns of salmon to the upper Columbia River linked to climate change.     

Creating a ‘temple society’ in the early medieval west

By the seventh century the church of the early medieval west was extremely richly endowed. This endowment went hand in hand with the increase in the number of clergy and monks, and with the pastoral and liturgical demands made on the church. Because of its pastoral and religious obligations, it should not be seen simply as a section of the elite. In order to understand the socio-economic role of the church in the early Middle Ages it is useful, instead, to draw on the anthropological model of the ‘temple society’.     

Model studies in computer seriation

A computer model is described which generates artificial incidence matrices, with statistical properties similar to those of a Merovingian cemetery, but with a known chronological order.These matrices are used to test the effectiveness of various seriation procedures. Both permutation search and multi-dimensional scaling methods are investigated. The effects of various similarity matrix transformations are also discussed.     

Negotiating Equality through Ritual: A Consideration of Late Natufian and Prepottery Neolithic A Period Mortuary Practices

Mortuary rituals, specifically secondary mortuary practices with the socially sanctioned removal of all or some parts of the deceased, are a powerful means of social integration during periods of social, economic, or environmental change. Integrating ethnographic data on the social impact of secondary mortuary ceremonies with archaeological evidence from the Late Natufian and Prepottery Neolithic A periods of the south-central Levant, this study explores how the development and maintenance of intentional secondary mortuary rituals, such as with the removal and reburial of skulls, served as powerful communal acts that symbolically and physically linked communities and limited the perception or reality of social differentiation. Continuity within, and meanings behind, secondary mortuary practices during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene prompts the researcher to reevaluate previous interpretations of the relationship(s) among the appearance of formalized social inequality, food production, and the definition of personal relations within Levantine Neolithic communities.