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The Hummingbird Creek archaeological site : an ancient hunting camp in Alberta’s central Rockies, Canada.

University of British Columbia

This thesis focuses on the significance of the Hummingbird Creek site (FaPx-1), a pre-contact archaeological site occupied between ~2,500 to 1,000 years ago, in the Alberta Rocky Mountains. This site yielded approximately 1,400 stone artifacts, including throwing spear (atlatl) projectile points, hide scrapers, expedient knives and production debris. I use geochemical (Portable X-Ray Fluorescence, pXRF) and mineralogical (Raman Spectroscopy) analytical methods on artifacts and source samples. I compared samples from local rock, and material gathered from a nearby procurement area, Pineneedle Creek, with artifacts found at FaPx-1. Carbonate diagenesis, and silica (SiO2) content were key attributes of artifacts, and we successfully associated some artifacts from FaPx-1 with Pineneedle Creek material. I infer that the local rock around FaPx-1 was virtually ignored, perhaps because of very low silica content. Based on expectations made through ethnographic examples of other montane hunter-gatherers, the material culture from FaPx-1 likely represents a specialized hunting camp; intended for staging hunting expeditions to areas known to yield successful hunts. Local Stoney First Nation traditional place names and oral accounts corroborate the interpretations of archaeological data and emphasize the need for Indigenous perspectives in Rocky Mountain archaeology in Alberta. This thesis incorporates material culture and geological analysis with a land-use and traditional knowledge interpretation and emphasizes the need for Indigenous perspectives in archaeological research.

Text

2018-04-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/65483

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/