Study of Acorns

For the past several years the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon have partnered with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz lnctians, and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs to assist Dr. Dale Croes of South Puget Sound Community Col lege (SPSCC) in providing stewardship and management over a unique site named the Sunken Village Site. This site is unique not just due to its preservation and content but also in that it has been an opportunity for International (Japanese sponsorship in this case), federal , state, and local agencies to work with Tribes in the preservation of a area that is geologically distinct and vitally important to the maintenance of the culture of the three Tribes involved. This world-wide partnership will not only allow us to better understand but also better protect one of the best wet sites on the Columbia River.

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The Lower Columbia River section of the Northwest Coast of North America is thought to have had one of the highest population densities north of Mexico during aboriginal times (Darby 2005; Pettigrew 1977, 1990; Silverstein 1990), yet it has only been in recent years that Chinookan sites and culture have been the focus of concentrated research efforts by professionals. Archaeological studies in the Portland Basin, U.S.A. from the mid-1980’s to the present under the direction of Dr. Kenneth M. Ames of Portland State University (PSU) have provided substantive new data for interpreting the region. Much of the research has focused on household archaeology at the large village sites of Meier (35CO5; Ames 1994; Ames and Maschner 1999) and Cathlapotle (45CL1; Ames et al. 1998, 1999). Just south of these major village sites, on the southern end of Sauvie Island, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. is the well-preserved wet site of Sunken Village (35MU4), placed on the National Historic Landmark registration by Dr. Ames and Maureen Newman Zehendner (Newman 1991). Only about 250 archaeological sites in the U.S.A. are given National Historic Landmark status, and Sunken Village site achieved this status from over 50 years of erosion and collecting at the site, not systematic excavation or professional investigations.

In September of 2006 and 2007 the first systematic testing and recording of this waterlogged wetland site finally happened as a cooperative U.S. and Tribal and international archaeological effort. The mapping of 60 acorn leaching pits and well-preserved basketry in 2006 caught the interest of Japanese researchers working with similar wet sites from ancient Jomon Japan, and they offered and sponsored the extended field work in 2007. With combined limited resources, and the typically resulting abundant wood and fiber artifacts from well-preserved wet sites, we felt it important to promptly report this initial and exciting first look at one of the most significant wetland sites on the Northwest Coast of North America, and fortunately we can share this comprehensive work with an international audience through the Journal of Wetland Archaeology.

Sunken Village (35MU4) represents the largest known acorn leaching pit site in North America. During the low waters of September 2007, the international team of Japanese, U.S. and Tribal archaeologists mapped over 110 hemlock bough lined pits containing remnants of numerous waterlogged acorns, as well as basketry fragments, wooden wedges and abundant wood and fiber debitage. We estimate that, if all pits recorded were used, over 2.5 million acorns could be leached in a season at this site.

One fragile and ancient diamond-plaited soft flat bag recovered has drawn attention from regional basketry experts in the desert west of the U.S.A. Great Basin, through Jomon period wet site specialists in Japan. This distinct basketry type is recorded for up to 9,000 years in cave sites in the state of Nevada, U.S.A through Klamath and Puget Sound Native American modern collects in Northwestern U.S.A. In Japan these diamond-plaited soft bags are seen associated with acorn pit waterlogged sites from 7,000 years ago through Ainu modern collections. We have used cladistic analyses to associate ancient Northwest Coast basketry through over 2,800 museum baskets collections, and plan to expand that sample into the contact and ancient U.S.A. Great Basin and Japanese Jomon basketry. We hope this will demonstrate the first concrete evidence of a broad Pacific and very ancient cultural sharing, where ideas moved rapidly throughout the North Pacific Basin, as demonstrated through the use of acorn pit processing/storage, and with the sharing of distinct styles of basketry around at least the North Pacific.

The Sunken Village report is set up in six synthetic sections, starting with the above Section 1 general introduction, forward and listing of the contributors that made this examination possible on a very limited budget. Section 2 introduces the physical setting of this pivotal location, at the junction of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, and how this unique location contributes to the cultural importance of this historic Chinookan trade center on the Northwest Coast of North America. The historic developments in the Sunken Village area are discussed, affecting the archaeological wet site and originally revealing its uniqueness through over fifty years of vandalism and collecting. The archaeological sequence setting is set forth as well. Section 3 outlines the 2006 and 2007 first systematic archaeological investigations of the Sunken Village NHL wet site, followed by the overall geoarchaeological interpretation of the wet site from test excavations, ground penetrating radar and deep-coring. Section 4 considers the floral and faunal remains, and especially the focus of the site use, the leaching of millions of acorns in pits. Section 5 details the rich wood, fiber, lithic and bone artifacts, especially the sensitive basketry artifacts. And Section 6 synthesizes the array of data considered and summarizes the ecological, artifactual, and functional context of this newly investigated and much better understood local, regional and Pacific-wide bridging wet archaeological site.

These are the data appendices for work done in 2006 and 2007 at the Sunken Village National Historic Landmark Site.  This data Appendices used to be on a web announced in the final published report of this site:

Croes, Dale R., John L. Fagan and Maureen Newman Zehendner
2009. Sunken Village, Sauvie Island, Oregon, USA,  the 2006-2007 Investigations of National Historic Landmark Site 35MU4. Journal of Wetland Archaeology Special Edition 9, 1-216.

This link no longer exists so we wanted to publish the Sunken Village data appendices here.

Acorns have enjoyed much success in the past and the present, from America to the Far East. Their history on the tables of Europeans, however, seems to have been characterized by many lows and very few highs. Traditionally associated by Greeks and Romans with utopian bucolic societies which predated the rise of Western civilizations, they ended up embodying the negative attributes of archaic primitiveness: barbarism, famine, emergency. Medieval sources are incredibly reticent, and mention acorns either as a food for pigs, or (when ground into flour to make bread) as an alternative to more desirable flours. Their status suddenly improved in the sixteenth century, when they timidly appeared on fundamental cookery books intended for the elite, only to get worse in conjunction with the success of coffee in Europe (to which acorn coffee represented a well-known alternative). In the present days, though, the rediscovery of traditional and local cuisine (especially in Italy) has elevated their status once again.

The extensive in situ acorn pits are the most remarkable fea­tures at this landmark site. During surface exposure and mapping, all such pits contained remnants of whole acorns. Also wood and fiber artifacts were observed in and around these pits, including a shredded cedar bark cape/skirt fragment, a broken wooden wedge, wooden arrow shafts, and a well-preserved basket distinctive of the region's fine basket work. The basket piece was found with intact base and sides (no rim remained) all carefully cross-warp twined of split cedar root (identified by Bud Lane, master weaver, Siletz, and Patricia Gold, master Wasco weaver, Warm Springs; Figures 5 and 6). The style of this basket is definitely from this region and demonstrates an ancient continuity of this style of basketry. Baskets found from northern ancient wet sites are of a very different style, and themselves demonstrate at least 3,000 years of basketry cultural continuity in Salish, Makah, and Tsimshian traditional territories.

For full final report on two summer's of explorations, second one sponsored by Japanese Archaeology program, see:

Croes, Dale R., John L. Fagan and Maureen Newman Zehendner
2009 Sunken Village, Sauvie Island, Oregon, USA,  A Report on the 2006-2007 Investigations of National Historic Landmark Site 35MU4. Journal of Wetland Archaeology Special Edition 9, 1-216.

Available on Amazon

During low waters of September a wet site team, sponsored by an international grant from Japan, returned to further record the National Heritage Landmark wet site of Sunken Village (35MU4), Sauvie Island, Portland, Oregon (Figure 1). The one week project (September 16 through 22, 2007) was designed to accurately map the surface features ( especially over a hundred in situ acorn leaching pits and wooden stakes) and surface arti­facts (especially lithic debitage and fauna! remains) as revealed in the limited evaluation of I 060 linear feet (320 metres) of beach before the riprap repair was permitted by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in October of 2006 (Croes, Fagan and Zehendner 2007; a PDF copy of this 2006 field work is available on the web - see References below). The project continues to be co-man­aged through the direct in-put by Cultural Resources Protection Specialists Eirik Thorsgard, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, and Robert Kentta, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indi­ans and in consultation with the Confederated Tribes of Warms Springs.

A joint team provided the expertise needed to carefully map and record the Sunken Village National Historic Landmark site, consisting of(a) the SPSCC Wet Site Archaeological Inves­tigations and Laboratory team, lead by Dr. Dale Croes, and the SPSCC Computer Aided Drafting Department, lead by Professor Michael Martin, (b) the AINW geoarchaeological and laboratory team, lead by Dr. Michele Punke and Maureen Zehendner, and ( c) the internationally known Wetland Archaeological Team from the National Institute for Cultural Heritage, Nara, Japan, lead by Dr. Akira Matsui.
This project was conducted through the sponsorship of a Japanese international grant under the administration of Dr. Akira Matsui, Chief Archaeologist, National Institute for Cultural Heritage, Nara, Japan, as well as support through the SPSCC Anthropology Club, an SPSCC Exceptional Faculty grant, Jean and Ray Auel, and volunteers from Portland State University and the Oregon Archaeological Society. Dr. Matsui brought four Japanese associates to participate in the field work: Dr. Naoto Yamamoto, Dr. Toru Miyao, Dr. Atsushi Iwasaki, and Dr. Tomonori Kanno (Figure 2). Dr. Matsui is a wet site expert and Pacific representative (along with Dr. Croes) of the Wetland Archaeology Research Project (WARP) out of Exeter, England. Dr. Matsui personally recognized the value of this waterlogged site on the Northwest Coast and especially the similarity of this site to a number of Jomon period wet sites that contain preserved acorn pits and basketry throughout Japan. His team had worked at a number of these Jomon wet sites.

Akira Matsui, who passed too early from cancer a few years back, had a column in the Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper, the most popular one in Japan with an estimated circulation of over 10 million (called the biggest newspaper in the world).  He wrote his column about our collaboration in excavating the National Historic Landmark Sunken Village wet site in Portland Oregon in 2007--he sponsored the project. My son Jaered Croes, who runs www.textfugu.com, a Japanese language teaching site, help us translate the article. (see publications on the Sunken Village wet site under Book section too):

Last September 2007, five fellow researchers and I went to Oregon in the United States of America to participate in an excavation. It all started when my old friend Professor Dale Croes from the South Puget Sound Community College emailed me saying: “I found some pits packed with acorns in an ancient Columbia River intertidal beach site called Sunken Village. Would you like to do a collaborative project there?”

We knew that in the fall, the ancient Japanese Jomon people would store large amounts of acorns in storage pits so that during the passing winter they would have food. However, there is a difference between how Eastern and Western Japan went about this. Eastern Japan Jomon put their storage pits on top of a hill, and the West puts it at the bottom of a hill in a muddy, wet place. We didn't know the reason for this. When I asked Dale about the acorn pits, we hoped that we could get some ideas through this Oregon work.

I've been part of the Higashimyo wet site research advisory board, Saga City Board of Education, coordinating the excavations and research since 2004. On the Ariake Sea, with the Kose River running along it, the early Jomon people lived there 7000 years ago. We found six shell middens, and around their bases we found 200 acorn storage pits. What surprised me was how many of the baskets were still preserved. By the time the excavation was over, the total number had risen to 730 basketry examples.

The Sunken Village wet site is approximately one hour North of Portland in the silty intertidal banks of the Columbia and Willamette River slough, located on the west side of Sauvie Island. The Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean about 70 km west of the site location, but even so, during high tide the site is submerged. When the water is pumped through garden hoses and fine adjust nozzles, you spray water to clean off the surface, and you can see the outline of frequent and overlapping acorn pits, so I'm sure you can imagine how long it would take to excavate this site where we located 114 acorn pits in a week of work. Through the center of the site runs an underground aquifer that comes from fresh, spring water. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why they are so concentrated in only this one area. We realized that the construction of the storage pits was adjacent to the water. First, they were 0.5 – 1 meter from the river bank. Lining the acorn pits were hemlock boughs, then they were concealed by woven basketry. The acorns here are in the white oak family so they are deciduous and have tannic acids in them. Before you eat them you have to crack and soak them in moving ground waters. Dale is doing an experiment where he made a model acorn pit in an aquarium and runs water through it, experimenting with methods to make the acorns edible. Last year, the storage pits we mapped had radio-carbon dates from 130 to 700 years old (as best as we can tell). I am sure if we dug deeper, we'd find even older materials, since our coring at the site revealed cultural layers to 3.5 meters deep!

To me, being able to directly compare the separated American Northwest Coast and ancient Japanese cultures has been a dream of mine since my student days, and I look forward to continuing this collaborative effort into the future.