Tag Archives: Dale Croes

Final Qwu?gwes wet site report is available for download

Posted on November 21, 2013 | 2 comments
Toy war club from Qwu?gwes site. Source: Qwu?gwes Report.

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 →

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Posted in anthropology, Archaeology, Northwest Coast, Shell Middens, Technology, Washington State

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Hoko River pictures are back

Posted on February 18, 2010 | 10 comments

Hoko River project director Dale Croes, apparently wearing chaps, at the site in 1977.

(Edit 2018 October: look here for current location of these pictures)

Some time ago I pointed readers to the vast repository of Hoko River wet site excavation pictures put online by Dale Croes.  Unfortunately, those links broke but now, via  blog reader APM, I hear that the Hoko photo gallery is back online.  I will definitely be mining this repository for lots of posts.  Not only is this one of the most interesting sites ever excavated on the Northwest Coast, the pictures are a superb combination of excavation, artifact, and camp life – the latter a visual record of local archaeology as social practice in the 1970s. Also, as I mentioned previously, the lush, rich colour of the old Kodachrome slide film is stunning – you just don’t see that in modern digital cameras or even print film, despite the undeniable advantages of digital.

From the main page, many of the most interesting pictures are found under the “camp life” link.  There you will be confronted with an awkward frames-based link layout.  Not all links work still, but I’d say 90% do.  You can browse easily by clicking on the pictures that open on the right-hand frame to get the next picture.  This is easier than keeping the mouse centred on the picture number to the left.  Right click on the picture to bring it up in its own window or tab.  Some pages are organized as thumbnails, such as the wet site stratigraphy series. Because of the slightly awkward interface, I’ll aim to create a series of posts here which point to what I think are interesting aspects of this wonderful site.

Richard Daugherty and survey crew evaluate potential of Hoko Site in 1967 in WSU research vessel.

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Posted in Archaeology, archives, Northwest Coast, pics, Washington State

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Photo Essay on the Qwu?gwes Site

Posted on January 31, 2010 | 2 comments

EDIT February 22, 2010: Pictures removed after communication from Lee Rentz (see comments).

Dale Croes has been doing great work for years on wet site archaeology, most notably a long association with the Hoko River wet and dry sites on the Olympic Peninsula.  More recently he has spent a decade or so at the Squaxin Tribe’s Qwu?gwes waterlogged site near Olympia, Washington.  I see that Lee Rentz’s Photography blog has a nice photo essay on the Qwu?gwes site called Ghosts Dwell in the Lowering Tide.

Wet sites can produce locally anaerobic (oxygen depleted) environments, preventing or slowing bacterial degradation of organics.  This allows survival of many artifact types which rapidly deteriorate in normal archaeological settings.  At Hoko, there are well preserved wooden artifacts over 2,000 years old, at Qwu?gwes the material is mostly about 700 years old.  Similar sites elsewhere on the Northwest Coast are mostly  less than 5,000 years old, with the notable outlier of Kilgii Gwaay, which is 10,500 years old.  Since some estimates put wood artifacts at 90% or more of NW Coast technology, you can imagine how revealing these rare, and increasingly threatened, waterlogged sites are.

The photos at Lee Rentz’s blog are excellent, and the text is accurate and informative.  Good to see!  If you want to find out more, some scholarly and other articles can be downloaded here, or you can work at Qwu?gwes yourself as part of a field school.

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Posted in Archaeology, Northwest Coast, underwater archaeology, Washington State

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