NW Migration Routes (was one of the Stuwix threads)

[Mike Cleven]

David Lewis wrote:
>
> There is quite a bit of contention of whether parts of california are PNW.
> This has been a historic battle between anthropologists and when I was at
> the Natural History Museum, their public wall map cuts the PNW at the
> Columbia I think, but I know it did not include California. I had to write
> a research proposal last year of the Tolowa and the departmental advisor
> for research said she did not agree that the PNW extends to California.

"Community consciousness" in the Northwest has always (mostly) regarded
Eureka and the coastal counties and towns as "part of the Northwest";
can't say for Weed and Shasta and Tule Lake.  Is Klamath Falls OR
Pacific Northwest?  Then Weed must be.... the 42nd (43rd) parallel was
an artificial division of the region that the US should have ignored
once it lost its British-Spanish relevance.  From what little I know of
northern California peoples, they were part of an extended community of
nations that spread over the hills and ranges that run south from the
banks of the Columbia.  Aren't the peoples of this region closely
related by culture and trade with the peoples of "southern Oregon"?

> Plus the fact that scholarship between Canada and USA on the PNW is divided
> by the international boundary creates another division. Many Canadian
> researchers stop the PNW at the border.

all too true; the same is true in the other direction of Americans, of
course; this is why my interest in bridging the border in cases like the
Stuwix mystery.....

Very little is fully integrated and
> understood of the PNW.

ditto

And there are many rivalries in the profession of
> anthropologists trying to prove THEIR theory of how human settlement began
> and the origins of it all. I'll give you references if you want but
> recently I had to deal with the Carlson-Matson& Coupland rivalry. M & C are
> trying to prove that humans can from an inland corridor, and they rename
> Carlson's Pebble Tool Tradition to be the Old Cordilleran Culture. They
> include very little of Carlson's research even though he is instrumental
> and necessary to archaeology in the PNW. One problem is that many refuse to
> believe that a marine migration is possible or that there were two
> migrations, inland and marine that were happening at the same time.

If an inland corridor is still a viability, I'd suspect that it's on the
_hither_ side of the Continental Divide, rather than beyond it.  If I
recall correctly geologists/glaciologists have now determined that there
was no "ice-free corridor" between the Rockies and the Laurentian
Ice-Sheet, at least nothing suitable for extended travel and migration.
Does anyone know in what year the central valleys and plateaus of the
Cordillera became ice-free, say from the upper Yukon southwards?  I'm
aware of the Coastal Plain theory, which seems more than plausible
despite the scale of underwater archaeology that would be required to
explore this deeply (so to speak).  But doesn't it seem that the
Fraser-Columbia Plateau is itself an ideal migration route, possibly one
with an amenable climate and perhaps abundant game......the lakes that
once studded the post-glacial valleys of the Plateau (notably the Fraser
and its tributaries) must have been more than suitable for fishing and
settlement.....so exactly how far back is "time immemorial" in this
region, anyway?