Incorporation of Near Surface Geophysical Methods to Household and Village Survey

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Colin Grier, along with an interdisciplinary team of scholars from Washington State University and the University of British Columbia, will conduct research to establish the footprint and internal organization of ancient cedar plankhouses in the Salish Sea region of the Pacific Northwest of North America. These large houses, and the complex multifamily households that resided in them, have been the economic engines of the society and the scale at which resources were managed and maintained over the last five millennia. Investigations of plankhouses will therefore provide foundational data for understanding how small-scale societies can effectively organize economics, people and resources in ways that promote sustainability and resilience at the local level. The study of Northwest Coast lifeways, with its emphasis on local management of resources and decentralized decision making, can reveal potentially new strategies and options for reshaping current social practices towards greater sustainability. Archaeology is particularly suited to address these goals because it considers a range of societies with multiple different organizational principles. The project will provide cutting-edge training for graduate and undergraduate students in these increasingly important geophysical techniques. Moreover, in the face of rising sea levels, the methodological advances that will result offer a mechanism to expediently collect critical archaeological data from the globally-threatened coastal archaeological record. Dr. Grier and his team will employ geophysical prospection methods, a set of techniques used to visualize the subsurface of archaeological sites without excavation. Traditional archaeological excavation is both costly and time consuming, which has resulted in a very limited sample of well-documented houses and villages for the region. Geophysical methods can provide a low-impact alternative, but they have been applied only in a limited way on the Northwest Coast. The researchers will develop a rigorous methodology for connecting the signals generated by geophysical techniques, such as ground penetrating radar and magnetometry, to specific buried archaeological features. They will generate a predictive model and evaluate predictions using limited "ground-trothing" excavation. Archaeological sites are a non-renewable resource, and geophysical methods, if systematically applied, can provide a means to acquire substantial data with minimal impacts, an approach consistent with the interests of First Nations/Native American Tribes, and useful for Cultural Resource Management practitioners and Public/Federal land managers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.