PSU Magazine Winter 2001

nature of the civilization of the Chi– nook has been lost. This area teemed with people for hundreds of years before the wagons made their way over the Oregon Trail." I n his search for the lost town ite, Ames took careful account of the maps of the area, but he also had the help of a local landowner whose fami ly had owned the property before it became a wildlife refuge. He took Ames to the part of the refuge where he found artifacts as a child. Ames and his students spotted depressions in the soft river soil that didn't look as if they had been formed by natural forces. They ran an auger into the ground and examined the soil, which was rich with material used and discarded by a people generation after generation. "Besides the artifacts-mostly tools and the debris from making tools– there is evidence of elk, deer, bears, beavers, skunk, and mountain lions. They were hunting mountain lions for food, which is very interesting," Ames says. "There were salmon, of cou rse, but also sturgeon and lots and lots of smelt. There are also a lot of floral remains, and there are acorns, hazel– nuts, and seeds." Ames, who has worked for 30 years to understand the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, says the site is one of the best preserved of any along the Columbia from The Dalles to the mouth of the river. "It may be the only Chinook vil– lage that's intact in Western Oregon and Washington," he says. At first, radiocarbon dating seemed to suggest that the town might be 1,000 years old, but subsequent exca– vations haven't borne that date out. Most of the material removed seems to span the last 500 to 600 years. "It's quite clear," says Ames. "We've been able to date the initial construc– tion of the two of the houses (we have been excavating), and they both date to about AD 1450. We still can't explain those earlier dates." The age and the sophistication of the town's organization are of consid– erable interest, because they fly in the face of generally held theories that assert that farming was the fir t and most important of all social revolu– tions. Through farming, it is held, peo– ple attached themselves to the land. Their permanent settlements grew into villages. With the addition of a political structure, villages became towns. As aristocracy developed and wealth accumulated, the large economies found they could upport specialized labor, which encouraged artistic and technological express ion. That's the theory and for the most part it's true. But the theory can't account for the people who lived for thousands of years in the Pacific Northwest portion of North America. These people had large towns, monu– mental architecture, enormou wealth, a highly evo lved artistic style, and an aristocracy. All without tilling a field. H ere in the wetlands of the Wapato Valley, the earth itself was very generous. Fish, birds, ani– mals, and people all enjoyed tremendous nat– ural abundance, and vegetation ran rampant just as it does today. The area was such a rich profusion of life and natural resources that despite flooding, the people returned time and time aga in to rebuild their homes and resume their relationship with nature's bountiful banquet table. "I think one of the most interesting things of all is that even though the site was flooded regularly, perhaps every year, the people returned," says Cameron Smith, a doc– toral tudent from Simon Fraser Uni– versity in Canada working with Ames. "Wetlands, of course, are one of the most productive biological zones that you can have on earth. They've got all of the fish. They've got all of the mammals that are walking around in the marshes, and a huge variety of birds. Combining a wetland's biologi– cal productivity with the predictable and abundant salmon run, and we ll, it is an This hammer head was meticulously pieced together by students of Ames's. The sculpture above, thought to be created by people living near the Colum· bia River 1000 to 300 years ago, is on display at the Portland Art Museum. WINTER 2001 PSU MAGAZINE 7