Toy war club from Qwu?gwes site. Source: Qwu?gwes Report. Click to enlarge.
Dale Croes kindly sent me a link to the final report for the Qwu?gwes wet site (45TN240), which is is located on Mud Bay at the southern end of Eld Inlet, Puget Sound, near Olympia, Washington (map). The site was apparently first occupied about 800 years ago. This report, hosted at NewsWARP, checks in at almost 1,000 pages and about 80 megs, and is the product of more than 10 years of field-school and collaborative research with the Squaxin Tribe. There look to be about two dozen authors. If you’re not up for the whole thing right away, there’s a much shorter executive summary you can download here. But it’s a really impressive report covering everything from stone to bone to wood, bark, root, wood I.D., ethnobotany, paleo-seismology, fishtraps, and more. It’s very clearly written at an accessible, non-technical level, largely by students. I’ll pick out a few of many highlights below. Continue reading
