Journal of Northwest Anthropology Memoir Series
Memoir 19
What does “home” mean? Cultural connotations of home, habitation, and residence vary but usually encompass a physical place where individuals live, with accompanying notions of comfort, security, and attachment to place. This concept is wide; for many, the idea of home operates at multiple scales and could refer to a physical house, a particular piece of land, drainage or valley, topographic landmarks, or even a specific room or landscape feature. What constitutes home might not even be a set physical space but could shift throughout the year or an individual’s lifetime. Given this variability, there is one constant: home is usually the place that is returned to, and the place that is the center of daily life for an individual or group. For this reason, archaeologists have long sought these loci as a means of understanding the economic, adaptive, social, and ritual elements of past human lifeways.
This volume focuses on archaeological houses, features, and places which may have constituted “home” to the inhabitants of the Columbia-Fraser Plateau. While boundaries of this cultural and physiographic area vary according to author, it generally encompasses the area drained by the Fraser and Columbia rivers and their tributaries. The Cascade Range bounds this region to the west, the Blue Mountains and central Idaho ranges to the south, and to the north and the east by the Rocky Mountain range. The Canadian Plateau consists of the Fraser, Thompson, and Okanagan drainages and adjacent mountains and features north-south trending narrow valleys and steep mountains. To the south, much of the interior Columbia Plateau consists of rolling hills, broad plains, buttes, mesas, and deeply dissected canyons. This region is home to diverse groups of people who have lived here since time immemorial, and who continue to live, use, and create spaces and places today. This region is variously referred to as the intermontane west, the interior northwest, or even simply the Plateau. We rely on the terms Columbia-Fraser Plateau or simply Plateau to refer to the general region, acknowledging that the area spans modern political borders between Canada and the United States. We further acknowledge that past peoples ascribed to their own spatial conceptions and that modern political boundaries between the United States and Canada did not exist until 1818 and were not established nor enforced for many decades after that date.