New Insights into the Old Cordilleran Tradition
Jim Chatters is an archaeologist and paleoecologist who has worked for nearly five decades to understand the human and environmental prehistory of the Pacific Northwest. Best known for his work in Kennewick Man, he has recently focused on the question of America’s peopling, notably the evidence for multiple immigrations from Beringia during the late Pleistocene and earliest Holocene. He is currently a senior Associate with AMEC Earth & Environmental, Inc in Bothell, Washington, where he is completing work on large-scale excavations at three Old Cordilleran Tradition sites.
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New Insights into the Old Cordilleran Tradition
Fifty years ago, B. Robert Butler introduced the idea of the Old Cordilleran Culture, a distinctive flake-and-biface lithic industry which he believed to represent the initial human occupation of Northwest America. We now know that Old Cordilleran was not the earliest. But it is distinct from its predecessors, so much so that it likely represents a secondary immigration down the Pacific Coast from Beringia. Despite its long history in the archaeological lexicon, the Old Cordilleran has received little research because its near-exclusive occurrence in near-surface deposits has made it difficult to date and information on subsistence impossible to obtain. Within the last decade, however, the first large-scale data recovery excavations, coupled with technological advances in dating and residue analyses, have made it possible to understand when and how Old Cordilleran folk lived their lives. This lecture will discuss findings from the excavation of three Old Cordilleran components near Granite Falls, Washington, with emphasis on the age, lithic technology, subsistence, and adaptive strategy of these early occupants of our region.