Kenneth M Ames
Biographic Data
| ID | 3616873 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kenneth M Ames |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kenneth M |
| FAMILY NAME | Ames |
| SIGNATURE | AMES K M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Portland State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8800-4756 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 403 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Were the Ancient Coast Salish Farmers? A Story of Origins
Were the ancient Coast Salish farmers? Conventional anthropological wisdom asserts that the ethnographically known communities of the Northwest Coast of North America were 'complex hunter-fisher-gatherers' who lacked any form of concerted plant food cultivation and production. Despite decades of extensive ethnobotanical and paleoethnobotanical study throughout the Pacific Northwest demonstrating the contrary, this 'classic anomaly' is still a cor…
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Inequality on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America measured by house-floor area and storage capacity
Recent large-scale comparative archaeological studies of wealth differences have used Gini coefficients to assess inequality, employing house-floor area as a standardised, cross-cultural proxy for wealth. Two such studies have found that storage capacity produces higher Gini coefficients than floor area, suggesting that the latter measures household wealth, while the former reflects anticipated income. Here, the authors test these relationships u…
Endowment, investment, and the transforming coast: Long-term human-environment interactions and territorial proprietorship in the Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada
Synthesis and analysis of the Early to Middle Holocene radiocarbon record for the Northern Northwest Coast of North America: A gap in dated components between ∼9000 and 8300 cal BP
The Northern Northwest Coast of North America has consistently been an epicenter of hunter-gatherer research, but attention has focused on the period after 5000 cal BP. Using data largely produced within the past 12 years, we present the first synthesis and analysis of this region’s 14C record between ∼11000 and 5000 cal BP. Our analysis produced two primary findings (i) that the number of dated sites does not increase or decrease significantly d…
The Radiocarbon Record of the Western Stemmed Tradition on the Southern Columbia Plateau of Western North America
The late Pleistocene-early Holocene archaeological record of the interior Pacific Northwest is dominated by what has been regionally referred to as the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). While various efforts have attempted to clarify the chronology of this tradition, these have largely focused on data from the Great Basin and have been disproportionately preoccupied with establishing the beginning of the tradition due to its temporal overlap with …
Building wooden houses: The political economy of plankhouse construction on the southern Northwest Coast of North America
Archaeological Survey of Dynamic Coastal Landscapes and Paleoshorelines: Locating Early Holocene Sites in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area, British Columbia, Canada
We present and test a predictive archaeological survey model that targets early Holocene paleoshorelines in the Prince Rupert Harbour area using LiDAR bare earth digital terrain models and a 15,000-year reconstructed history of relative sea level change. Despite a century of archaeological research in the study area, no sites dating earlier than 6000 cal b.p. had been identified prior to our research. Our field survey identified three early Holoc…
Radiocarbon Dating the Fur Trade: Bayesian Analyses of Fur-Trade Era Radiocarbon Dates from the Lower Columbia River
Estimating Marine Reservoir Effects in Archaeological Chronologies: Comparing Δr Calculations in Prince Rupert Harbour, British Columbia, Canada
The best method for quantifying the marine reservoir effect (MRE) using the global IntCal Marine13 calibration curve remains unresolved. Archaeologists frequently quantify uncertainty on MRE values as errors computed from single pairs of marine-terrestrial radiocarbon ages, which we argue significantly overstates their accuracy and precision. Here, we review the assumptions, methods, and applications of estimating MRE via an estimate of the addit…
Radiocarbon test for demographic events in written and oral history
Significance Indigenous oral traditions remain a very controversial source of historical knowledge in Western scientific, humanistic, and legal traditions. Likewise, demographic models using radiocarbon-based simulation methods are controversial. We rigorously test the historicity of indigenous Tsimshian oral records ( adawx ) using an extended simulation-based method. Our methodology is able to detect short-duration (1–2 centuries) demographic e…
Urbanism in Northern Tsimshian archaeology
We consider the provocative idea of whether urbanism as a condition or process is visible in Northern Tsimshian archaeology. We define the condition of urbanism through four traits, each of which we associate with measurable variables. We explore changes in these across the study area in 100-year time bins over 6000 years. We also consider urbanism as a process that includes five kinds of relations. We consider these through six chronological sta…
Assessing the Scale and Pace of Large Shell-Bearing Site Occupation in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area, British Columbia
Methodological advancements in geoarchaeology and spatial and chronological modeling are opening new avenues to interpreting large coastal shell-bearing sites. We document the developmental histories of two such sites around Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada, using systematic percussion coring, intensive radiocarbon dating, and 3D surface mapping with Total Station and LiDAR. We also re-analyze a third site (Boardwalk/GbTo-31) excavated and radiocarb…
The role of small villages in Northern Tsimshian territory from oral and archaeological records
Small villages have been central to progressive models of hunter-gatherer-fisher complexity on the Northwest Coast as a stage in the narrative of increasingly nonegalitarian social relations. We argue that Tsimshian settlement history is more complicated. We examine settlement and chronological data for 66 village sites in the Tsimshian area, 22 of which we define as small. Small villages were present in the area as early as 6500 years ago, but t…
Thinking about Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast
Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast
Structured Tumult: A Review Forum for Robert L. Bettinger's Book, Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California
A Marine Reservoir Effect ∆R Value for Kitandach, in Prince Rupert Harbour, British Columbia, Canada
Prince Rupert Harbour (PRH), on the north Pacific Coast of British Columbia, contains at least 157 shell middens, of which 66 are known villages, in an area of approximately 180 km 2 . These sites span the last 9500 yr and in some cases are immense, exceeding 20,000 m 2 surface area and several meters in depth. Recent archaeological research in PRH has become increasingly reliant on radiocarbon dates from marine shell for developing chronologies.…
The Bear Creek Site (45KI839), a Late Pleistocene–Holocene Transition Occupation in the Puget Sound Lowland, King County, Washington
The Bear Creek site in Redmond, Washington, yields important information about settlement, subsistence, and technology in the Puget Lowland during the late Pleistocene–Holocene transition. The lithic assemblage is dominated by expedient flake technology, but also contains bifaces and retouched tools. Ongoing analyses focus on site formation, procurement strategies of lithic raw materials, production of flake tools, and technological comparisons o…
Stable isotope and ancient DNA analysis of dog remains from Cathlapotle (45CL1), a contact-era site on the Lower Columbia River
Comments on the Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies
The author discusses the development and persistence of permanent inequality in human societies. He comments on an article which undertakes inequality in premodern societies and proposed that intergenerational wealth transmission is the reason for the evolution and persistence of inequality, mentioning the three categories of wealth including material, relational, and embodied.
Dart and Arrow Points on the Columbia Plateau of Western North America
The timing of the bow and arrow's introduction, spread, and replacement of the atlatl is an important research question in North American prehistory. Although regional archaeologists have not focused on the issue, it is generally thought that the bow and arrow were introduced on the Columbia Plateau ca. 2,300 years ago and completely replaced the atlatl by 1000 B.P. We apply two sets of discriminate functions and four threshold values to three la…
Large Domestic Pits on the Northwest Coast of North America
Excavations of prehistoric and contact-period houses on the southern Northwest Coast of North America have exposed very large interior pit complexes. The complexes are either long trenches or rows of pits beneath the house floors. They are associated with substantial permanently occupied houses dated to between 300 CAL B.G. and A.D. 1830. The pits add significantly to the storage potentials of these houses and suggest surplus production
On the use of species-area curves to detect the effects of sample size
Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast
Since the late 1970s, household archaeology has become a key theoretical and methodological framework for research on the development of permanent social inequality and complexity, as well as for understanding the social, political and economic organization of chiefdoms and states. This volume is the cumulative result of more than a decade of research focusing on household archaeology as a means to gain understanding of the evolution of social co…
The Northwest Coast: Complex Hunter-Gatherers, Ecology, and Social Evolution
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
The archaeology of the longue durée: Temporal and spatial scale in the evolution of social complexity on the southern Northwest Coast
The emphasis on temporal and geographic scale of the French Annales school of history (cf. Braudel 1980; Baker 1984; Lewthwaite 1988) is the inspiration for this paper. Braudel (1980) divides time into three durations: short term events (days, weeks, months, a few years), medium length conjunctures (years, decades, even major portions of centuries), and longterm structures (which may last centuries, even millennia). This last duration is the long…
Slaves, chiefs and labour on the northern Northwest Coast
Northwest Coast societies, at the beginning of the Modern period, were stratified. The coast's élite wielded power over a class of slaves whose labour produced at least some of the wealth upon which high status depended. While it is possible to trace the development of an élite on the northern Northwest Coast back 3000 calendar years, if not more, documenting the presence of slavery has proven far more intractable. Understanding the evolution of …
Dart and Arrow Points on the Columbia Plateau of Western North America
The timing of the bow and arrow's introduction, spread, and replacement of the atlatl is an important research question in North American prehistory. Although regional archaeologists have not focused on the issue, it is generally thought that the bow and arrow were introduced on the Columbia Plateau ca. 2,300 years ago and completely replaced the atlatl by 1000 B.P. We apply two sets of discriminate functions and four threshold values to three la…
Household Archaeology of a Southern Northwest Coast Plank House
Five seasons of excavation at the Meier site, near Portland, Oregon, have exposed portions of a very large (14 m × 35 m) plank house dating to late prehistoric times. The Meier house is unusual not only because of its size but because it is part of a Northwest Coast residential site that is not a deep shell midden. Detailed information about the frequency of repair and modification of the house indicates the great extent to which the site's occup…
Villages, Demography and Subsistence Intensification on the Southern Columbia Plateau
Semi-sedentary villages were established on the southern Columbia plateau by 4300 years before present. Demographic changes accompanying this event included a major shift in human population dispersion. While previous archaeological explanations have emphasized salmon productivity as the major variable in these changes, archaeological and ethnological evidence strongly supports the view that intensification of plant exploitation was the critical …
The Evolution of Social Ranking on the Northwest Coast of North America
The small, hierarchically organized societies on the Northwest Coast provide excellent examplex of the evolution of social complexity in nonagricultural contexts and thus can serve as an important testing ground for current models. Available archaeological data indicate that ranking appeared on the coast between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago. It is argued here that ranking developed from the interaction of two systems constraints and two processes: s…
On the use of species-area curves to detect the effects of sample size
Were the Ancient Coast Salish Farmers? A Story of Origins
Were the ancient Coast Salish farmers? Conventional anthropological wisdom asserts that the ethnographically known communities of the Northwest Coast of North America were 'complex hunter-fisher-gatherers' who lacked any form of concerted plant food cultivation and production. Despite decades of extensive ethnobotanical and paleoethnobotanical study throughout the Pacific Northwest demonstrating the contrary, this 'classic anomaly' is still a cor…
Stable isotope and ancient DNA analysis of dog remains from Cathlapotle (45CL1), a contact-era site on the Lower Columbia River
Large Domestic Pits on the Northwest Coast of North America
Excavations of prehistoric and contact-period houses on the southern Northwest Coast of North America have exposed very large interior pit complexes. The complexes are either long trenches or rows of pits beneath the house floors. They are associated with substantial permanently occupied houses dated to between 300 CAL B.G. and A.D. 1830. The pits add significantly to the storage potentials of these houses and suggest surplus production
The Radiocarbon Record of the Western Stemmed Tradition on the Southern Columbia Plateau of Western North America
The late Pleistocene-early Holocene archaeological record of the interior Pacific Northwest is dominated by what has been regionally referred to as the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). While various efforts have attempted to clarify the chronology of this tradition, these have largely focused on data from the Great Basin and have been disproportionately preoccupied with establishing the beginning of the tradition due to its temporal overlap with …
Building wooden houses: The political economy of plankhouse construction on the southern Northwest Coast of North America
The role of small villages in Northern Tsimshian territory from oral and archaeological records
Small villages have been central to progressive models of hunter-gatherer-fisher complexity on the Northwest Coast as a stage in the narrative of increasingly nonegalitarian social relations. We argue that Tsimshian settlement history is more complicated. We examine settlement and chronological data for 66 village sites in the Tsimshian area, 22 of which we define as small. Small villages were present in the area as early as 6500 years ago, but t…
Beyond affluent foragers: Rethinking hunter-gatherer complexity
Inequality on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America measured by house-floor area and storage capacity
Recent large-scale comparative archaeological studies of wealth differences have used Gini coefficients to assess inequality, employing house-floor area as a standardised, cross-cultural proxy for wealth. Two such studies have found that storage capacity produces higher Gini coefficients than floor area, suggesting that the latter measures household wealth, while the former reflects anticipated income. Here, the authors test these relationships u…
Endowment, investment, and the transforming coast: Long-term human-environment interactions and territorial proprietorship in the Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada
Radiocarbon Dating the Fur Trade: Bayesian Analyses of Fur-Trade Era Radiocarbon Dates from the Lower Columbia River
A Marine Reservoir Effect ∆R Value for Kitandach, in Prince Rupert Harbour, British Columbia, Canada
Prince Rupert Harbour (PRH), on the north Pacific Coast of British Columbia, contains at least 157 shell middens, of which 66 are known villages, in an area of approximately 180 km 2 . These sites span the last 9500 yr and in some cases are immense, exceeding 20,000 m 2 surface area and several meters in depth. Recent archaeological research in PRH has become increasingly reliant on radiocarbon dates from marine shell for developing chronologies.…
Estimating Marine Reservoir Effects in Archaeological Chronologies: Comparing Δr Calculations in Prince Rupert Harbour, British Columbia, Canada
The best method for quantifying the marine reservoir effect (MRE) using the global IntCal Marine13 calibration curve remains unresolved. Archaeologists frequently quantify uncertainty on MRE values as errors computed from single pairs of marine-terrestrial radiocarbon ages, which we argue significantly overstates their accuracy and precision. Here, we review the assumptions, methods, and applications of estimating MRE via an estimate of the addit…
Assessing the Scale and Pace of Large Shell-Bearing Site Occupation in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area, British Columbia
Methodological advancements in geoarchaeology and spatial and chronological modeling are opening new avenues to interpreting large coastal shell-bearing sites. We document the developmental histories of two such sites around Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada, using systematic percussion coring, intensive radiocarbon dating, and 3D surface mapping with Total Station and LiDAR. We also re-analyze a third site (Boardwalk/GbTo-31) excavated and radiocarb…
Archaeological Survey of Dynamic Coastal Landscapes and Paleoshorelines: Locating Early Holocene Sites in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area, British Columbia, Canada
We present and test a predictive archaeological survey model that targets early Holocene paleoshorelines in the Prince Rupert Harbour area using LiDAR bare earth digital terrain models and a 15,000-year reconstructed history of relative sea level change. Despite a century of archaeological research in the study area, no sites dating earlier than 6000 cal b.p. had been identified prior to our research. Our field survey identified three early Holoc…
Synthesis and analysis of the Early to Middle Holocene radiocarbon record for the Northern Northwest Coast of North America: A gap in dated components between ∼9000 and 8300 cal BP
The Northern Northwest Coast of North America has consistently been an epicenter of hunter-gatherer research, but attention has focused on the period after 5000 cal BP. Using data largely produced within the past 12 years, we present the first synthesis and analysis of this region’s 14C record between ∼11000 and 5000 cal BP. Our analysis produced two primary findings (i) that the number of dated sites does not increase or decrease significantly d…
The Battle of the Sideboards
Villages, Demography and Subsistence Intensification on the Southern Columbia Plateau
Semi-sedentary villages were established on the southern Columbia plateau by 4300 years before present. Demographic changes accompanying this event included a major shift in human population dispersion. While previous archaeological explanations have emphasized salmon productivity as the major variable in these changes, archaeological and ethnological evidence strongly supports the view that intensification of plant exploitation was the critical …
The Evolution of Social Ranking on the Northwest Coast of North America
The small, hierarchically organized societies on the Northwest Coast provide excellent examplex of the evolution of social complexity in nonagricultural contexts and thus can serve as an important testing ground for current models. Available archaeological data indicate that ranking appeared on the coast between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago. It is argued here that ranking developed from the interaction of two systems constraints and two processes: s…
Hierarchies, Stress, and Logistical Strategies among Hunter–Gatherers in Northwestern North America***This paper is dedicated to the memory of Millie G. Crowley (1947–1983).
Archeology: Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology . Matthew Spriggs , ed
The archaeology of the longue durée: Temporal and spatial scale in the evolution of social complexity on the southern Northwest Coast
The emphasis on temporal and geographic scale of the French Annales school of history (cf. Braudel 1980; Baker 1984; Lewthwaite 1988) is the inspiration for this paper. Braudel (1980) divides time into three durations: short term events (days, weeks, months, a few years), medium length conjunctures (years, decades, even major portions of centuries), and longterm structures (which may last centuries, even millennia). This last duration is the long…
Household Archaeology of a Southern Northwest Coast Plank House
Five seasons of excavation at the Meier site, near Portland, Oregon, have exposed portions of a very large (14 m × 35 m) plank house dating to late prehistoric times. The Meier house is unusual not only because of its size but because it is part of a Northwest Coast residential site that is not a deep shell midden. Detailed information about the frequency of repair and modification of the house indicates the great extent to which the site's occup…
Archeology: Long‐Term Subsistence Change in Prehistoric North America. Dale R. Croes, Rebecca A. Hawkins , and Barry Isaac
The Northwest Coast: Complex Hunter-Gatherers, Ecology, and Social Evolution
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Chiefly Power and Household Production on the Northwest Coast
Archaeology, Style, and the Theory of Coevolution
The Prehistory of the Northwest Coast. R. G. Matson and Gary Coupland
Hidden dimensions: The cultural significance of wetland archaeology
Hidden dimensions: The cultural significance of wetland archaeology
The Wintu and Their Neighbors: A Very Small World-System in Northern California
On the cutting edge of world-systems theory comes The Wintu and Their Neighbors, the first case study to compare and contrast systematically an indigenous Native American society with the modern world at large. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, and history, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly M. Mann have scoured the archaeological record of the Wintu, an aboriginal people withou…
Slaves, chiefs and labour on the northern Northwest Coast
Northwest Coast societies, at the beginning of the Modern period, were stratified. The coast's élite wielded power over a class of slaves whose labour produced at least some of the wealth upon which high status depended. While it is possible to trace the development of an élite on the northern Northwest Coast back 3000 calendar years, if not more, documenting the presence of slavery has proven far more intractable. Understanding the evolution of …
Going by Boat
Vashon Island Archaeology: A View from Burton Acres Shell Midden
The Project: A Tribal Perspective--Judy Wright2. The Project: An Archaeological Perspective--Julie K. Stein3. Ethnographic Background--LLyn De Danaan4. Field and Laboratory Methods and Procedures--Mary Parr, Julie K. Stein, and Laura S. Phillips5. Stratigraphy and Dating--Julie K. Stein6. Historic Artifacts--MaryAnn Emery7. Lithics--Timothy Allen8. Bone and Antler Tools--Laura S. Phillips9. Faunal Analysis: Mammal and Bird Remains--Kristine Bovy1…
The Northwest Coast
Over the past several decades, archeological research on the Northwest Coast of North America has focused on the evolution of the coast's well-known native societies. This research has two broad goals: building local and regional culture histories spanning the Holocene and answering processual questions about the evolution and persistence of cultural complexity among hunter-gatherers. Cultural complexity includes relatively dense populations, par…
Political and Historical Ecologies
This chapter contains section titled: INTRODUCTION POLITICAL ECOLOGY HISTORICAL ECOLOGY POPULATION ECOLOGY SUBSISTENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT RETHINKING SUBSISTENCE BURNING SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Marmes Rockshelter: A Final Report on 11,000 Years of Cultural Use . Brent A. Hicks
Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast
Since the late 1970s, household archaeology has become a key theoretical and methodological framework for research on the development of permanent social inequality and complexity, as well as for understanding the social, political and economic organization of chiefdoms and states. This volume is the cumulative result of more than a decade of research focusing on household archaeology as a means to gain understanding of the evolution of social co…
Beyond affluent foragers: Rethinking hunter-gatherer complexity
On the use of species-area curves to detect the effects of sample size
Large Domestic Pits on the Northwest Coast of North America
Excavations of prehistoric and contact-period houses on the southern Northwest Coast of North America have exposed very large interior pit complexes. The complexes are either long trenches or rows of pits beneath the house floors. They are associated with substantial permanently occupied houses dated to between 300 CAL B.G. and A.D. 1830. The pits add significantly to the storage potentials of these houses and suggest surplus production
Archaeology (37 works) · Geography (34 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (33 works) · History (20 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (14 works) · Geology (12 works) · History (12 works)