Abstract

It is clear from wet site archaeological research and from ethnographic collections that artifacts made of wood and fiber regularly comprised over 90% of the material culture of the populations in the Pacific Northwest prior to contact. Yet, because wood and fiber artifacts do not usually preserve well, they have not featured prominently in the efforts of archaeologists to shed light on the ancient history of human settlement in the Pacific Northwest. Rather, archaeologists working in the region have relied heavily on stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts to generate their cultural historical hypotheses. In the study reported here we used cladistic tree-building methods from evolutionary biology to investigate whether the evolution of basketry artifacts mirrors that of non-perishable artifacts. Significantly, the tree derived from the stone, bone-antler and shell data differs from the trees derived from the basketry data. The former cluster sites by traditional phase time periods, whereas the latter cluster sites geographically. This suggests that there was a difference in the transmission of information regarding the manufacture and use of the two groups of artifacts. Ideas pertaining to the artifacts made of stone, bone-antler and shell seem to have been shared widely, whereas ideas associated with the artifacts made of basketry were not. There are several possible explanations for this difference, but ethnographic evidence suggests that it is probably primarily a result of the basketry artifacts playing a role in ethnic identity signaling in a way that the stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts did not.