QRC members lead and participate in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research projects from the study of past earth climates and glaciations to shifts in the geographic distributions and evolution of vegetation and faunal communities, to the evolution and dispersals of the genus Homo and the increasing scales of human modification of earth environments through the Holocene. QRC provides a venue for meeting and collaborating with scholars across Quaternary disciplines. We are also fortunate to be able to provide seed funding and small grants for member research projects. We are especially happy to support grad student and junior scholar research activities, much of which leads to larger, external funding from agencies like the National Science Foundation.
Preserving human-environment relationships: Nineteenth Century food practices on the Grand Ronde Reservation
Abstract: For millennia, the subsistence strategies and settlement patterns of western Oregon Native communities relied on interconnected biotic, aquatic, and social systems. Euro-American settlement in the region during the nineteenth century strained these links. Introduced diseases led to declines in the Native population while Euro-American crops and livestock and the cessation of Native landscape management altered regional ecology. In the 1850s, removal of over 30 western Oregon bands and tribes to the Grand Ronde Reservation segregated Native groups from long-important resources and ecosystems. The reservation community also grappled with numerous government attempts to terminate pre-reservation lifeways. Historical and ethnographic research suggests that despite these challenges, those at Grand Ronde continued to harvest traditional foods on the reservation and further afield. This work provides few specifics, however, on reservation diet composition, including the relative consumption of Euro-American and traditional foods. Furthermore, little archaeological research has focused on nineteenth century Native communities, at Grand Ronde and throughout the Pacific Northwest. The lack of material evidence from this period limits our understanding of the ecological, political, and social changes occurring in the region and the ways Native communities responded to them. In collaboration with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Tribal Historic Preservation Office and the Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology field school, this project uses archaeological survey and excavation to investigate a nineteenth century reservation settlement. Fieldwork will concentrate on identification of cultural deposits containing remains of consumed plants and animals. Zooarchaeological and macrobotanical analysis will identify reservation food taxa and differences in food preparation and consumption across the site. These data will provide insight into reservation daily life, the shifting ecological and economic systems of nineteenth century western Oregon, and the strategies employed by Native groups to maintain connections to their cultural landscapes.