Oregon Archaeology

Chapter 6: Southwestern Mountains and Valleys

328 Chapter 6 Southwestern Mountains and Valleys Southwest Oregon shares with northwest California the massive and deeply dissected Klamath Mountains, which include the distinctive Siskiyou range that lies athwart the Oregon-California border. Some of Oregon’s oldest rocks occur here; the Paleozoic shales, sandstones, reefs, and submarine pillow basalts of the Klamaths reveal that they began more than 250 million years ago as a series of island arcs developed on the eastward-moving Pacific plate. The great folding, distortion, and metamorphism seen in their stratigraphy reflects the pressure and heat of an inexorable slow-motion collision of these exotic terranes with the North American continent, when the accumulating mountains also absorbed huge magma intrusions from below as the oceanic plate carrying them dived beneath the continental edge (Orr et al. 1992). The volcanic Cascades that are so prominent today formed just east of the Klamaths much later, beginning only some 30 million years ago, and the two mountain systems now crowd one another so closely that the regional landscape is almost all steep and rocky. Interior valley systems are few and small, and their rivers penetrate to the Pacific through steep, narrow canyons. The Klamath Mountains are comparatively low, however, with few peaks above 7,000 feet and most interior valley floors around 1,000–1,500 feet above sea level. Corresponding to this altitudinal range, the high mountains are snowy in winter but the lower elevations have relatively mild winters and hot summers that are the driest in western Oregon. Archaeological sites that people occupied at different seasons for varied purposes are widely scattered in this complex landscape (fig. 6.1). Its exceptionally rugged physiography makes remoteness and isolation a dominant characteristic of southwestern Oregon, and has strongly shaped its plant, animal, and human communities. The biota is varied and complex, including some species that exist only here, and others that have persisted in SOUTHWESTERN MOUNTAINS AND VALLEYS 329 isolation after spreading into the region from neighboring wetter or dryer areas as climates fluctuated over time (Detling 1968; Todt 1990). Human societies were also affected by this cut-up landscape, as indicated by the high degree of linguistic and ethnic differentiation within its comparatively small geographic area. The Cultural Context The native people were separated by the deep dissection and ruggedness of their country into many scattered bands. The Shasta, a Hokan-speaking group, extended from the middle Rogue River southward to the Klamath River in California. Speakers of Penutian languages included the Lowland Takelma of the upper Illinois and middle Rogue River valleys, the Upland Takelma of the upper Rogue, and the Cow Creek Umpqua and Yoncalla of the Umpqua Basin. Speakers of Athapaskan languages occupied both sides of the Klamath Mountains, their range extending along the coast and upriver to include the Upper Umpqua and Upper Coquille valleys. Islands of Athapaskan speakers also lived in the Medford-Grants Pass area, surrounded by people using Penutian languages. Athapaskan groups included, from north to south, Fig. 6.1. Southwest Oregon ethnic group territories and site locations. 330 OREGON ARCHAEOLOGY the Upper Umpqua (excluding the Cow Creek Band of Upper Umpqua, who spoke Takelman), Upper Coquille, Kwatami, Tututni, Shasta Costa, Chetco, Tolowa, Galice, and Applegate bands. The material culture and life ways of Southwest Oregon’s various communities shared a great deal in common, even though many neighbors spoke different and unrelated languages—the similarities being due no doubt to similar economic adaptation to a huntingfishing -gathering lifestyle, similar environmental conditions and materials, and routine intermarriage and social interaction between adjacent groups (Sapir 1907; Miller and Seaburg 1990). The diverse languages spoken in Oregon’s southwestern mountains during the nineteenth century reveal that the native peoples had very distinct ancestries. The Shasta speak a Hokan language, descended from an ancient far-western speech community that probably goes back well over 5,000 years in the region, and possibly twice as long. The Takelma, Cow Creek Umpqua, and Yoncalla, whose languages all belong to the Penutian phylum, are descended from a single Kalapuyan speech community that became widespread in western Oregon 5,000 or more years ago. A much later migration was that of the Athapaskans, who came from a far northern region in southeast Alaska, probably arriving between about 1,500 and 1,000 years ago (Foster 1996; Moratto 1984; Shipley 1978). A surviving illustration of an Umpqua house from the 1850s shows a substantial rectangular plank...