II. DEFINITIONS

[2] In order to maintain a measure of conceptual clarity it will be necessary to define both general areal terms such as Plateau, Upper Columbia, and Vantage locale, and more specialized archaeological concepts such as component, phase, and subphase. Whether or not these definitions correspond in detail to generally accepted views is largely beside the point since each has been designed as an heuristic device in the organization of data both from the Sunset Creek site and the Plateau as a whole.

AREAL TERMINOLOGY

The Plateau. What is the Plateau? To the general geographer and cartographer, the Plateau often designates that area between the Cascade and Rocky mountains and north of the Great Basin. It is thus a large triangular area roughly equal to the Columbia-Snake river system. In addition the cartographer frequently uses the term Columbia Plateau to refer to that area between the Okanagon Highlands on the north and the Blue Mountains on the south, and between the Columbia River on the west and the eastern margin of the Palouse Hills.

The physiographer (see Freeman et al., 1945), on the other hand, has a somewhat more restricted and better defined idea of what the Plateau should and should not be. Thus the Columbia Intermontane Province is said to extend from the Waterville Plateau, the Channeled Scablands, the Palouse Hills of Washington southward to the Harney-High Desert, the Malheur-Boise Basin, and the Owyhee Upland of central Oregon and southern Idaho, with a finger extending up the Snake River Plain nearly to Yellowstone.

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The ethnographer (see Ray 1939; 1942) thinks of the Plateau as a culture area including groups as far north as the Carrier and Sekani of central British Columbia, as far south as the Umatilla and Nez Perce, as far west as the Lillooet and Chilcotin, and as far east as the Kutenai and Flathead. Ethnographically speaking, then, the Plateau extends far northward into the Cascade Mountain system of British Columbia and eastward into the Rocky Mountains, while elsewhere it corresponds roughly with the physiographer's Plateau.

Archaeologists have never settled on a definition of the Plateau for archaeological purposes, although comparative studies in Plateau archaeology invariably take into account all the available data within the ethnographically defined Plateau. Such a one to one correlation is useful at the late prehistoric level of analysis, although sequences in the Fraser River valley clearly indicate that this area has not always been closely related to cultural developments in the rest of the Plateau (Borden 1962; Sanger 1963). This concept of what the Plateau constitutes has been used in this report only when discussing certain ethnographic relationships or when making archaeological comparisons on the late prehistoric level. Unless it appears in such a context, the term Plateau is used to refer to the semiarid or nuclear portion of the Plateau, an area roughly equivalent to the Columbia Basin Sub-province of the Columbia Intermontane Province (Freeman et al., 1945). This definition serves to limit the areal extent of what we call the Plateau to an area which is roughly equivalent to our archaeological knowledge and ecologically similar throughout.

Areal Divisions within the Plateau. Because it would be virtually impossible to create areal divisions which were meaningful in every period of Plateau prehistory, the divisions used here are matters of convenience largely reflecting geographically limited areas in which field work has brought to light large amounts of data. There are three such regions: the Middle Columbia, the Lower Snake, and the Upper Columbia.

The Middle Columbia region extends from The Dalles, Oregon, to Priest Rapids. In this area salvage archaeology in three major reservoirs in addition to some highway and pipeline salvage work has provided extensive quantities of field data. The major published sources for this area are pre¬sented in Figure 1.

The upper Columbia region extends along the Columbia River from Priest Rapids to the Canadian border and also includes the Sun Lakes-O'Sullivan Reservoir area (see Fig. 1). Salvage archaeology in six major reservoirs plus work for the state parks at Sun Lakes and Fort Spokane has made available a great amount of data to which this report is a contribution.

Within the Upper Columbia region we may single out the area in which the Sunset Creek site is located, giving it the title the Vantage locale. The Vantage locale extends along the Columbia River from Priest Rapids to Wenatchee. Sometimes the phrase, the greater Vantage locale, is used to include the additional area around Sun Lakes and O'Sullivan Reservoir.

[3] The Lower Snake region extends from the mouth of the Snake River to its junction with the Clear-water River. Archaeological salvage in three reservoirs have made major sequences available for this region (see Fig. 1).

ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTS OF TIME AND SPACE

The four terms to be discussed here are phase, subphase, component, and subcomponent. The concepts of phase, subphase, and component are adapted from Willey and Phillips (1958) and are in keeping with the precedent set by Swanson (1958; 1962a) for the Vantage locale. The term subcomponent has been adopted in order to sort out some of the complex cultural and stratigraphic units within one of the components at the site.

Phase and Subphase. Enlarging on the definition of Kidder (Kidder et al., 1946:9), Willey and Phillips (1958:22) offer a very encompassing definition of the term phase, saying that it is "an archaeological unit possessing traits sufficiently characteristic to distinguish it from all other units similarly conceived, whether of the same or other cultures or civilizations, spatially limited to the order of magnitude of a locality or region and chronologically limited to a relatively brief interval of time." The subphase is thought of by these authors as a more refined unit, primarily temporal in character and often reflected in changes in trait frequencies rather than trait occurrences. As Willey and Phillips point out, where the line between the phase and subphase distinction is to be drawn will depend upon the researcher's analysis and may at times be rather arbitrary.

Although well within the limits of this definition, the systematic use of phases to describe events and periods in Plateau prehistory suffers from a basic liability. The defining criteria for phases in the Plateau are often weak, frequently being limited to stylistic changes in projectile points. This is true of four of the five recognized phases in the Vantage locale and the vast majority of phases elsewhere in the Plateau. This has led some archaeologists to discard the concept of phase and speak only of specific traditions and more loosely defined periods.

This unfortunate situation is due largely to sample sizes which tend to be quite small for all periods except the late prehistoric. It is also a function of sampling error, for the bulk of our knowledge comes from the riverside encampemnts. We know, however, that bands operating in the Plateau had a varied yearly economic round producing different kinds of sites and tool assemblages in different ecologic settings. This is clearly demonstrated by ethnographic and archaeological data (see below, comments on the Frenchman Springs Phase and the origin of the Cayuse Phase). As a result we can only reliably compare assemblages for a single such setting, the river bank.

The basic assumption which underlies the use of phases to organize Plateau prehistory is that changes in projectile point types are reflections of more basic changes in artifact inventory and/or ecological adaptation. These changes, it is further assumed, will become apparent as we accumulate more data. These assumptions are based in part upon emerging patterns not yet clearly defined in sequence but nevertheless strongly suggestive of sequential change. Thus the only Frenchman Springs Phase burials (represented at a single site) are extended rather than flexed as is characteristic of Cayuse Phase burials. However, we do not know what burial forms existed during the Quilomene Bar and Vantage phases. Therefore we cannot state that extended burials characterize the Frenchman Springs Phase and distinguish it from immediately earlier and later phases even though it is very possible that they do.

Cultural Component and Cultural Subcomponent. A cultural component is a manifestation of a phase or a subphase at a specific site and does not necessarily correspond to a geological stra¬tum or stratigraphically defined subdivision thereof. The use of the term component is cultural and not geological in nature. The concept of the subcomponent has been developed in order to deal with a special problem in dealing with stratigraphic relationships within a specific component. At the Sunset Creek site the upper cultural component is contained in a thick layer of midden associated with sporadic pit house building. These pit houses and other stratigraphically bounded areas within the component can be arranged in a sequence, but areas not so bounded cannot because house building has produced extensive stratigraphic inversions. When the component as a whole is a unit of comparison these inversions are meaningless; but when we wish to examine change through the duration of component occupancy it is important that we distinguish the series of stratigraphically bounded subcomponents from the amorphous body of the component itself. It should be added that the analysis of the sequence of subcomponents proved of value in defining a series of subphases. [3]

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LAST REVISED: 18 NOV 2014