NCW Libraries

"Archaeology - along with Native American traditions and memories - holds a key to understanding early chapters of the human story in Washington. This all new book draws together and brings up to date what has been learned about the state's prehistory and the environments early people experienced. It presents a sample of sites representing Washington's geographic regions and touches on historical archaeology, including excavations at fur-trade forts...

From dust cover: "The authors highlight the 1977 discovery on the Olympic Peninsula of a mastodon that was hunted and butchered by man 12,000 years ago, a bone spear broken off in the ancient elephant's rib conclusively establishing the presence of man in the Northwest at an earlier period than previously had been known. Other archaeological excavations that are discussed and illustrated are the famed Marmes Man and the Lind Coulee sites in eastern...

A record of the stone age relics dug from along the Columbia River.

"The skeleton known as Kennewick Man was discovered in 1966 by two young men along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. When the skeleton was brought to Jim Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, Chatters first believed that the remains were those of a nineteenth-century pioneer. He was astonished when radiocarbon dating revealed the skeleton to be approximately 9,500 years old, making it one of the oldest skeletons ever found in North America....

"In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities - and thus Indian and urban histories - are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily...