Ancient America: The Marmes Rockshelter (museum tour)

by Ojibwa for Native American Netroots

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Sunday, Jun. 14, 2020 Sunday, Jun. 14, 2020 at 8:30:06am PDT

For thousands of years, the ancestors of today’s American Indians occupied the area along the Columbia River. Archaeologists have found some of the earliest evidence of human occupation at the Marmes Rockshelter. Occupation at this site dates back to 11,250 BCE.

By 9700 BCE, Indian people using the Marmes Rockshelter were cremating their dead. In their book Archaeology in Washington, Ruth Kirk and Richard Daugherty report:

“Apparently the same corner of the rockshelter has been repeatedly used for cremations, perhaps spaced decades apart. The resulting hearth measured about 10 feet across.”

Within the hearth were the bones of at least six people: three adults and three children between the ages of 8 and 14.

With regard to the mortuary practices at the Marmes Rockshelter, anthropologist James Chatters, in his book Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans, writes:

“Marmes Rockshelter, it seems, had been an ancient crematorium.”

Prior to cremation, the bones of the dead are cleaned of their flesh.

Ochre and large implements were used as offerings. Contact with the Pacific Coast indicated by Olivella shells in the cremation pit.

With regard to the archaeological data uncovered at the Marmes Rockshelter, E.S. Lohse and Roderick Sprague, in their chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians, write:

“Diagnostic artifacts included leaf-shaped and stemmed stone projectile points, lanceolate and ovate shaped knives, large stone scrapers and choppers, polyhedral stone cores and prismatic blades, bone awls, bone needles, and bone atlatl spurs. Broken food bone showed that aboriginal inhabitants were taking and eating deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, and beaver. Freshwater mussels from the Palouse River had been gathered and eaten as well.”

A grass lined pit at the Marmes Rockshelter indicates that the people storing some food, although this does not appear to have been a major part of the subsistence pattern.

With regard to the archaeological importance of the Marmes Rockshelter, Kenneth Ames, Don Dumond, Jerry Galm, and Rick Minor, in their chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians write:

“However, the site is unusual: it is one of the few excavated rockshelters dating to this period; its artifact assemblages are unusually diverse (containing artifacts such as very small bone needles, which seldom occur elsewhere); and it was used for burials throughout this period, which makes it unique.”