Jordan Thompson, Washington State University

Recent archaeological evidence points to the Southern Columbia Plateau as an early entry point for the Peopling of the Americas. Understanding the landscape is essential to adaptation in new and changing environments, and archaeological methods combined with Indigenous knowledge are uniquely positioned to investigate these human-environment relationships. In this talk, Jordan Thompson will present collaborative research which integrates geoarchaeology and ethnogeology to examine how land use, mobility, and placemaking shaped the establishment of seasonal subsistence cycle among the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce). This talk will focus on Nimíipuu subsistence in an understudied portion of the western Bitterroot Mountain uplands, a segment of the Northern Rockies, in the North Fork Clearwater River watershed of Idaho by examining toolstone sources, their distribution across the landscape, and how these features acquire meaning.