Cultural Historical Context of Qwu?gwes (Puget Sound, USA): a Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

Recent research at the Puget Sound site of Qwu?gwes indicates that it contains a Late Period component of stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts, as well as a waterlogged section containing basketry, cordage and wooden artifacts and associated manufacturing debris. In order to place Q w u?g w es into the culture historical context of the Central Northwest Coast, we have applied cladistic tree-building methods to data derived from these artifacts and from artifacts commonly found in the northern part of Puget Sound, the Gulf of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington State, and Vancouver Island. The tree derived from the stone, bone-antler and shell data differs from the trees derived from the basketry data. 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.