Environment and Landscape:

The Interior Plateau cultural region is located in the northwestern United States and British Columbia. It is flanked to the west by the Rocky Mountains and to the east by the Cascade Range and the Canadian Coastal Mountains, and the Fraser and Columbia rivers run through the region. These mountains have the effect of making the environment within the region incredibly varied. Fig. 1 to the left highlights some of the major environmental zones (each zone detailed below):

It is very important to understand the different landscapes of the Interior Plateau, and how these zones have changed throughout time, as human activity is often incredibly reliant on the environment, and we can track cultural changes in response to plant growth/temperature of an area.

Fraser river area: semi-open coniferous forests and dry grasslands with various flora and fauna.
Fraser river continued. This is a zoomed out image of the landscape, showing the often patchy landscape associated with this area.
Columbia plateau region: arid shrublands intermixed with tributaries of the major rivers in the region. This environmental zone blends into the Great Basin cultural area and shares many of the same qualities. In fact, many cultural exchanges took place in the past between these two regions.
Middle Columbia region: steppe sagebrush and pine forests. Assorted types of berries and root plants grow extremely well in dry areas like this.
Upper Columbia: more thickly wooded pine forests with meadows and grasslands near rivers.

The Interior Plateau also has access to many resources. Later classical-era pithouse cultures (and some earlier cultural traditions that practiced a more sedentary lifestyle) took advantage of this by living in what scientists call “ecotones”, or areas that are adjacent to multiple ecosystems. This allowed groups to forage and hunt for multiple resources at once as well as monopolize one type of resources when others were not in season, meaning that groups had a relatively constant food source and did not need to develop storage systems.

Some of the plants/animals available to plateau peoples:

Berries, especially along rivers and in dry grasslands ravaged by fire
Root plants and geophytes
Seeds
Nuts
Bark
Salmon and mussels
Deer
Mountain goats and sheep
Rabbits
Beavers
Bears

Classic Housepit Culture:

The classical cultural system associated with the Interior Plateau is called the plateau pithouse tradition. It began roughly 3500ya but came to be the full-fledged system that lasted until European contact period around 2500ya.

The plateau pithouse tradition is known for their winter village living system, where large villages and kin groups would spend summers foraging and hunting to store for the winters. During this time, salmon and roots plants and vegetables were extremely important, as they could be easily dried and stored for the winter months. These peoples lived in pithouses. These were round (or sometimes square) dug out residences that were around 5-20m in diameter. The roofs were held up with posts, and the were used as both an entrance to the house and also as a place to dispose of garbage, as this would help to insulate the house.

Large houses could house upwards of 30 people, although the houses varied in size. All houses, however, were organized into spaces for cooking, sleeping, gathering, etc. Cooking rooms included hearths that were used for roasting roots and heating the house. In larger homes that housed multiple families, each family had its own living space that included specialized rooms as well.

Finally, after many years, the pithouses wold start to decay, and the posts would rot. Upon returning from summer hunting and scavenging trips, families would build over rotting floors, or sometimes burn down portions of the house and build on top of them. This makes the pithouses an incredible source of archaeological material, as many of them contain years and years of layered occupations. Additionally, burned materials would be moved and piled up around the rim of the pithouse making the pithouse deeper and again saving years and years of archaeological materials.

: This is an example of a classical-era pithouse. Beams hold up the roof, which consists of diagonal beams (almost like a tepee) covered in various mats and then earth and grass.

: This is an example of the curved benches that would often be built along the walls of the pithouses that acted as tables and beds during different times of the day.

: Ladders that lead out of the rooftop entrance to the pithouse were made of a single log with notches cut out for footholds. These ladders were often decorated.

: After the beams and floors started to rot after a couple of seasons, the structure would be burned and the remaining materials would be pushed to the side to build up the rim of the pithouse. Day to day trash would also be used to build up the roofs and rims.

Contact Period:

The first recorded encounter of Europeans with the native Americans of the pacific northwest/ interior plateau was in July 1774. This occurred when a Spanish navigator named Juan Perez met a group of Indians off the coast of the island Langara. This initial contact was said to have been peaceful and tentative from both parties involved. This contact was soon continued with basic trade between the two parties, which eventually turned into full-scale fur trade between the groups.

When the fur trade began to move inland, the general nature of the relationship between the Indian populations and Europeans remained the same. While the increased contact did definitely increase the amount of cultural exchange, indigenous populations remained largely in control of the resources and the way that the two groups interacted, and controlled the changes themselves. Although, some changes did come about to the native way of life.

This Process of mutual benefaction persisted for awhile in the area, until in the 1840s American settlers began to move west to the Oregon territory. Many of these settlers also moved through and began to live in the plateau region as well. Many native groups in the area began to succumb to diseases brought by the settlers and were angered by the encroachment on their lands which brought conflict to the region among the settlers and the Indian populations. The US government worked for awhile to set up treaties with the tribal groups to establish areas where Americans could and could not settle, but this was soon abandoned when gold was found on the Thompson river (as well as other rivers in the area) and settlers and miners flooded into the area with little to no regard for boundaries that had been established. The settlers brought with them diseases that killed off many native populations and their mining processes depleted salmon populations, which destroyed many native groups’ resources.

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