R. Scott Byram | Tectonic History and Cultural Memory: Catastrophe and Restoration on the Oregon Coast | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 108.2

Tectonic History and Cultural Memory

Catastrophe and Restoration on the Oregon Coast

by R. Scott Byram

ON A WINTER EVENING IN 1700, the village at the Nilestun shoreline on the Oregon Coast was wrenched in a massive earthquake. Deep cracks formed as the sand below liquefied with the earth movement and oozed to the surface. The land began to sink relative to sea level, and within a few moments a massive tsunami entered the Coquille River estuary, scouring the shoreline and pushing driftwood and dune sand well beyond the limits of tidewater. More tsunamis likely followed. When the large waves finally ceased, the village and the rest of the Nilestun shoreline remained underwater. One account from Coquille oral history describes how "the tidal wave tore up the land and changed the rivers."²⁰

Many Coquille Indians may have lost their lives that winter night. Yet, the communities by the shore of the estuary recovered. In the long run, the economics of Coquille society were not greatly transformed. The tools and food remains left behind after the event are much like those that predated the event. In the 1850s, the fisheries in the Nilestun area were considered the largest and most economically important to the people of the Coquille River.

Landscape changes at the Nilestun shoreline demonstrate the impermanence of estuary shores on the Oregon coast, yet through all of these changes the Native communities were resilient and the biological productivity of the estuaries remained high.

Not many years ago, most residents of the Northwest held the view that earthquakes were a risk for people living in California, but they were not likely to occur in western Oregon and other parts of the region. Volcanic eruptions were widely recognized as the greatest disaster threat, as memorialized at Crater Lake and demonstrated in 1980 at Mount St. Helens. In the late 1980s, however, geologists began to realize that massive earthquakes and related tsunamis had occurred every few centuries on the coast. Knowledge of these events has long been a part of Native peoples' oral tradition, and archaeological evidence and related landscape changes are evident at historic villages and other Native American sites along the coast.

Earthquakes and tsunamis are terrible realities for communities in many parts of the world. The largest and most devastating are those that occur along a subduction zone, where offshore and continental tectonic plates move against each other. The edges of the opposing tectonic plates may remain locked for centuries, accumulating strain and raising the land elevation along the shore. When the strain is too much for the friction between the plates to hold, they release suddenly, producing a massive earthquake and subsidence or uplift of the landmass at the continent's margin. As the plates unlock, the edge of the continent moves across the subducting ocean floor, displacing many cubic miles of water and resulting in a massive tsunami.

Most of us are familiar with the devastating effects of the Sumatran earthquake and tsunamis that swept across the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004. On the shores closest to the source of the quake, entire towns were obliterated by a towering wave only minutes after the ground began to shake. Tsunamis traveled hundreds of miles in other directions and caused devastation as far away as Thailand and India. Though rare in any one region, such events happen often enough that their effects are well known. Forty-three years ago, a subduction zone along the coast of Alaska ruptured in a 9.2 magnitude earthquake, and the resulting tsunami destroyed several coastal villages and spread southward along the Pacific Coast, taking four lives in Oregon and eleven more in Crescent City, California. In 1960, an even larger subduction zone earthquake on the coast of Chile produced tsunamis twenty-five meters high, causing much damage in Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines.

On the Cascadia Coast — which extends from northern Vancouver Island in British Columbia to Cape Mendecino in northern California — infrequent, catastrophic earthquakes are a reality. This region is west of the Cascade Mountain Range, a north-south trending range of actively volcanic and geologically young peaks. Oregon contains some 350 miles of the 750-mile shoreline.

Although geologists had long recognized that Cascadia was an area of tectonic subduction, until the mid-1980s there was consensus that the offshore Juan de Fuca Plate was moving under the edge of the opposing North American Plate in a steady but gradual manner, producing little perceptible earth shaking. Seismologists Thomas Heaton and Hiroo Kanamori at the California Institute of Technology first pointed out the likelihood of subduction zone quakes in Cascadia in 1984. Three years later, U.S. Geological Survey geologist Brian Atwater found the first on-the-ground evidence for a subduction zone quake on the shores of Willapa Bay in southern Washington.² A small forest of cedar trees growing on a coastal plain had subsided rapidly into the intertidal zone, and the trees soon died in the new salt marsh conditions. The snags and stumps of these cedars were still standing, but radiocarbon dates placed the event at approximately three hundred years ago. Atwater also found buried soil layers, now exposed in the banks of the salt marsh channels, which had been well above the brackish tidewater prior to the subsidence.

After Atwater's findings were published in Science in 1987, other evidence of Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) events began to come in.³ Researchers later pinpointed the date and time of the earthquake using archival tsunami records in Japan. Based on the recorded wave characteristics, they estimated the magnitude of the quake at 9.0 and determined that the date and time of the event was nine o'clock on the evening of January 26, 1700.⁴ Remaining geological research questions about CSZ events have largely to do with the extent and magnitude of each event, with some research suggesting that portions of the subduction zone shifted at different times, producing smaller earthquakes and tsunamis than events that occurred along the entire CSZ.

This special section of the Oregon Historical Quarterly focuses on the history of Cascadia earthquakes and tsunamis on the Oregon coast and the effects of these events and related landscape changes on the Native people who lived on this coast for millennia. Two of the contributors are Oregon coast Indians with considerable expertise in tribal history. Patricia Whereat Phillips and Jason Younker address the traditional narratives of tsunamis and subsiding shorelines with fresh perspectives, while continuing the long tradition of retelling these narratives for the benefit of current and future generations. Robert Losey and I bring perspectives from archaeology.

Patricia Whereat Phillips is a Miluk Coos Indian who grew up by the slopes of Qalatl Mountain at Coos Bay. She comes from a family of tribal historians, and she honed her knowledge of Hanis and Miluk dialects as a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Oregon. In her contribution, Whereat Phillips retranslates traditional narratives depicting massive tsunamis and ground movement at Coos Bay in the not-so-distant past. She considers the mythical and historical context of the narratives, emphasizing "how deeply the image of great waves rolling across the land is embedded in Hanis Coos culture."

Jason Younker is an active member of the Coquille Indian Tribe and an assistant professor of anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Younker, who grew up on the shores of South Slough, shares his appreciation for a landscape that is a key anchor point for indigenous oral tradition. His essay presents a personal perspective on the calamitous events that affected his ancestral community at Coos Bay. He considers the instructive value of the tsunami narratives in Coos Indian oral tradition, observing that accounts clearly relate how people avoided disaster through respectful behavior toward the natural world and strategies of survival and recovery.

Robert Losey is recognized as the foremost researcher on the historical effects of Cascadia earthquakes and tsunamis on Native communities. A professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, Losey uses an interdisciplinary approach, integrating archaeological research with a thorough consideration of Native oral tradition, geology, and paleoecology. He focuses on two villages sites on the northern Oregon coast, where people lived before, after, and probably during the 1700 earthquake and tsunami. Considering both the short- and long-term effects of these events on those communities, Losey points out that subduction earthquakes and tsunamis "are not of themselves disasters or catastrophes" but are better viewed as hazards. People have a role in determining the scope of a hazard through the choices they make. He argues that the residents of the Oregon coast had the means to survive past CSZ events and resume village life relatively quickly, probably more than we would today.

Collaborations among tribal heritage specialists, geologists, and archaeologists have led to some remarkable findings. Although most of these projects have not focused specifically on earthquakes and tsunamis, research at several coastal archaeological sites in recent years has revealed some of the effects of CSZ events and related sea-level changes. This special section is my first opportunity to bring together these findings as a dimension of Cascadia earthquake and tsunami history.

AS LONG AS PEOPLE HAVE LIVED on the Oregon coast, the landscape has been altered greatly by Cascadia earthquakes and long-term climate-related changes in sea-level.⁵ For countless generations, subduction-zone earthquakes and tsunamis represented a terrific threat to coastal communities, yet they may have also brought about ecological restoration. Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes caused landslides and triggered devastating tsunamis, but they often replenished the intertidal portions of estuaries, enhancing the most productive setting for traditional coastal fishing practices.

Native American place-names reflect some of the legacy of those changes. For example, the Athapaskan name Enashet, for Crook Point in Curry County, has been translated as 'moving-ground place.'⁶ Comparisons of modern and historic survey maps show the extent of land loss on this headland, and there is visible evidence of ongoing landslides there. Another south coast headland has the Athapaskan name Qa'-i-na'-na-i-tc'-tunne, which has been translated as 'where the trail is no longer used' or 'people all departed'. It designates a small headland and cove where a coastal village was abandoned after the houses and many inhabitants were buried by a massive landslide. Archaeologists working with Siletz Tribe heritage specialist Robert Kentta have pieced together the history of this locality. The layers of earth at Qa'-i-na'-na-i-tc'-tunne show clear signs of a landslide covering the shell debris and stone tools of a village. These layers have been radiocarbon dated, establishing that the landslide occurred sometime after 1500 AD.⁷ Although Qa'-i-na'-na-i-tc'-tunne is an excellent place for a coastal village, located at a protected cove with a fast-flowing stream of freshwater, the site was not reoccupied after the landslide, apparently for generations. The locations of villages destroyed by tsunamis may have been treated the same way, avoided for many years and memorialized in place-names and oral tradition.

This east-west cross section, running roughly through Seaside and Portland, shows the Juan de Fuca Plate descending as it moves toward the heavier North American Plate.

Courtesy of Robert Losey

There are many other places on the Oregon coast where oral history depicts catastrophic events and even more locations where researchers have found archaeological and geological evidence of large-scale landscape changes. In the span of a single generation, Oregon coast physiography and ecology may appear to be relatively static aspects of the environments people live in; but viewed over the long term, this is hardly so. Bays become valley floors, and river channels migrate, shifting canoe routes and fisheries over wide areas. Dunes form and sweep across forests and prairies, and massive fires reduce forestlands and load stream channels with sediments that settle downstream in estuary marshes.

The area of subduction, which is east of the deformation front, is ten to one hundred miles offshore, but the effects of Cascadia earthquakes extend many miles inland.

Courtesy of Robert Losey

Landscape changes occur at different temporal and geographic scales. Locally, the frequency and magnitude of storms, seasonal wind, and rainfall patterns bring incremental changes over long periods, while landslides, fires, and floods bring more rapid changes. Regionally, Cascadia earthquakes and tsunamis transform tidewater shores every five centuries on average, with gradual uplift occurring at many locations in the intervening periods. The Cascadia Coast is also affected by changes on a global scale. Sea-level changes over centuries, caused by climatic variation and related glaciation, produce vast changes to ocean shorelines.

The choices people make are also a major factor in the way environmental change affects a society. People live at particular locations based partly on their perceived exposure to risk, and societies may pass on knowledge of environmental conditions so that even infrequent hazardous natural events may be considered by those who establish new villages or campsites. There are also direct cultural influences on the environment, such as controlled burning of forests and prairies, which encourages the growth of favored plants and promotes habitat for game.⁸

The most recent landscape changes are often the most evident. On the Cascadia Coast, inland watersheds were deforested after the 1840s, leading to sedimentation in river valleys and tidal wetlands. The Tillamook Burn, a series of large forest fires that swept through Oregon's northern Coast Range mountains from 1933 to 1951, altered Tillamook Bay to such an extent that its effects are still prominent today. Along the coast, diking and draining of tidal wetlands, dredging and removal of woody debris, channel realignment, and jetty construction also have had major effects.

Climate-related global sea-level changes and tectonic shifts are much more dramatic. Fifteen thousand years ago, the shoreline of the Oregon coast was from two to ten miles west of its current location and over 300 feet lower in elevation. Between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, glaciers retreated around the globe and sea level began to approach its current level. We know little about what the Oregon coast looked like then, but a team of Oregon State University archaeologists, led by Loren Davis, is examining sites from this period to determine which settings people would have lived in during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. By identifying buried soil layers that date to this period, they know where to look for evidence of cultural activity.⁹

Indian Sands, in Curry County, is one of the few Oregon coast archaeological sites with a soil that dates to the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. The coastal headland would have been a promontory at the western edge of a ridge overlooking a coastal plain. Davis's team has identified stone tools in a 10,500-year-old soil at this site, though the precise age of the artifacts is not known. Previous fieldwork and radiocarbon dating by University of Oregon archaeologists Madonna Moss and Jon Erlandson identified a scatter of 8,000-year-old mussel shell, establishing this as one of the oldest sites on the Oregon coast. During the early Holocene, people camped on a surface of wind-borne sediments that had been lifted from the exposed shoreline as the ocean retreated in response to increased glaciation.¹⁰

Through the early Holocene, rising seas eroded much of the early coastline and produced dune sheets that have continued to grow during the last 7,000 years. Beginning in the 1990s, Moss and Erlandson dated hundreds of Oregon coast archaeological sites, and nearly all of them date within the last 3,500 years or so.¹¹ Most earlier sites and landscapes have been worn away by erosional processes. Many documented coastal villages occur in stabilized dune soils, which are well drained and well suited to building houses. But even vegetated dunes may not be stable surfaces over many generations.¹²

At the Tseriadun site in Port Orford, cycles of repeated dune stabilization and reactivation set the stage for villages and then repeatedly buried the remains over thousands of years. Recently, the Coquille Tribe, the Siletz Tribe, and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department worked with the city to preserve the site as a state park, while documenting erosion of the archaeological resources.¹³ In one episode five thousand years ago, dunes swept across this coastal village, sealing in what appears to be the floor of a house as well as a nearby shell midden. In addition to stone tool fragments and charcoal, this time capsule holds mussel shell, urchin spines, and — attesting to the longstanding proficiency of coastal hunters — numerous sea lion bones. Repeated dune movement across the site eventually stabilized, and for centuries the people of this community built several more plank houses with smooth clay floors. Tectonic uplift appears to have been a factor in stabilizing the site.

INSIGHT INTO PAST ENVIRONMENTS often comes from those who live and work closest to the land. Rancher Rick McKenzie knows the landscape of the southern Oregon coast as well as anyone. When researchers from the Coquille Tribe began studying landscape changes in the New River Lowlands, McKenzie took them to a place on his ranch by the shore of New Lake. Scattered across the site, on a broad knoll just a few feet above the floodplain, were fragments of shell and debris from stone tool-making. Most interesting were the shells themselves. They were not razor clams from the nearby beach or mussels from offshore rocks, but bay clams such as cockles, gapers, and butter clams. Today, the nearest saltwater bay where such species are common is the estuary of the Coquille River, fifteen miles to the north. Archaeological investigations of the midden and soil layers at the New Lake site revealed an extensive buried shell layer with stone and bone tools, the remains of sea lions, and other marine mammals and fish such as salmon and flounder.¹⁴

Oral tradition indicates that the Athapaskan-speaking people who once lived on the shores of this former bay were known as Kwatami, 'people by the inside water'. Their descendants are among the Siletz and Coquille Indians. At the time the Vikings were settling in Iceland, the Kwatami people were hunting and fishing on the shores the Kwatami estuary, which is now an expansive alluvial plain and a small lake. Over time, the estuary, which may have been miles across during the middle Holocene, reduced in size as Floras Creek and its other feeder streams brought sediments from uplands that settled out in the tidal currents. The wetlands of the Kwatami estuary may have oscillated between tidewater and freshwater, depending on the extent of vertical movement produced by Cascadia subduction. The demise of the Kwatami estuary meant a major subsistence shift for the residents of this portion of the Oregon coast. The change may have been abrupt, involving earthquake-related uplift, or gradual, as stream deposited silt accumulated on salt marshes and they emerged to form alluvial terraces.

These sea lion and waterfowl bones and fire-cracked rock and cockle shells were exposed during archaeological excavation at the New Lake Midden site on the McKenzie Ranch.

Courtesy of R. Scott Byram

Archaeological sites that occur in the intertidal zones of today's estuaries can serve as a record of past sea-level changes. These sites hold evidence that can tell us how people responded to tsunamis and tectonic subsidence. One common site in Oregon is the wood-stake fishing weir, which consists of lines of vertically positioned wooden stakes arranged to guide fish into traps. University of Oregon archaeologists and heritage specialists Donald Ivy of the Coquille Tribe and Robert Kentta of the Siletz Tribe have identified over eighty of these sites in Oregon estuaries.¹⁵ The buried portions of the weir stakes can remain preserved for many centuries, and several weir sites hold a record of tectonic subsidence history that compares with nearby buried marsh sequences studied by geologists.

The Ahnkuti site in Yaquina Bay has the longest dated sequence of repeated fishing-weir building on the Oregon coast. From 2,100 years ago to the nineteenth century, people built and used fishing weirs here at the mouth of a tributary tidal slough channel. The weirs were used to catch fish that entered the slough with the high tide. Today, at the Ahnkuti site, the 2,100-year-old weirs are never above water, even during very low tides; and they are found below 1,100-year-old weirs, which are in turn overlapped by those dating to 350 years ago.¹⁶

Burial and preservation of the Ahnkuti fishing weirs may have been caused by rapid subsidence during CSZ events. At a nearby Yaquina Bay marsh, Portland State University geologist Curt Peterson revealed a sequence of buried marsh surfaces capped by tsunami sands, dating to 300 years ago, 800 years ago, and 1,100 years ago, with older undated layers present at deeper levels.¹⁶ The comparable age, depth, and stratigraphic sequence at the Ahnkuti site shows that the Yaquina Bay Indians maintained tidewater fishing traditions through several earthquake and tsunami events and over many generations.

RESEARCH ON THE ESTUARY portion of the Coquille River has greatly advanced our understanding of the effects of Cascadia subduction events on the heavily populated tidewater shores of the Oregon coast. Four thousand years ago, the tidally influenced portion of the Coquille River was more of an open bay than the tidal river channel is today. This transformation involved sea-level changes, local landform processes, and Cascadia earthquakes.

In 1992, the Coquille River estuary became one of several locations on the Oregon coast to reveal evidence of the last CSZ event. Alan Nelson of the U.S. Geological Survey dated organic material from a buried soil layer on the bank of the river that once was a high and dry shoreline. This soil, is now submerged during high tides due to earthquake-associated sinking of the coast in January 1700. Part of this soil exposure occurs along the Nilestun shoreline, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge.

In 1994, researchers with the Coquille Indian Tribe and the University of Oregon began investigating the history of archaeological sites on the Nilestun shoreline and in nearby tidewater settings. Previous studies had shown that the remains of villages or fishing camps were present in the 300-year-old soil layer, but those studies predated Atwater's discovery of periodic CSZ events.¹⁸ Lines of wooden stakes, the remains of fishing weirs, were known to occur along the intertidal Nilestun shoreline, and researchers assumed that the stone tools in the upper portion of the site were left by people who had fished in the adjacent intertidal riverbank at low tide.

The 1994–1995 University of Oregon/Coquille Indian Tribe project was the first to focus on the wood-stake fishing weirs in this estuary. A suite of radiocarbon dates established that weirs were used for over three thousand years along the changing shoreline of the Coquille estuary. Archaeological sites were mapped and sampled, and findings were related to geological research being performed at the same time by Robert Witter of the University of Oregon. Examining soil core samples, Witter was able to show that at least twelve subsidence events had occurred in the Coquille estuary during the last 7,000 years, and during these events the land surface dropped one meter or more. Gradual uplift may have occurred during intervening centuries, but older surfaces remained buried beneath later ones in the marshes along the estuary margins.¹⁹

Native people used wooden stake weirs, such as this one on the tidal flats of Coos Bay, to guide fish into basketry traps or to corral them for spearing. Tidal weirs were critical to the livelihood of Oregon coast communities for millennia, providing year-round harvests of marine and anadromous fish.

Courtesy of R. Scott Byram

Expansive salt marsh channels flow through the lowlands north and south of the Coquille River in Coos County, Oregon.

Courtesy of D. Pitkin, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

In the winter of 1996–1997, massive erosion caused by an El Niño–related storm occurred at the Nilestun shoreline, exposing extensive archaeological materials. Extremely high flood waters had overtopped the artificial levee that bordered the adjacent lowlands; and as the storm surge receded, the waters drained from the flooded agricultural field through a gap in the levee that soon expanded into a washout over fifty feet in diameter. Donald Ivy and Sharon Parrish of the Coquille Indian Tribe immediately assembled a team to document the eroding portion of the site.²⁰

During low tide, archaeologist Robert Losey measures a hearth in an eroding bank at the Nilestun fishing village, which was submerged during the 1700 CSZ earthquake and tsunami.

Courtesy of Robert Losey

The team found a stratigraphic sequence that was unlike any they had seen before. The lowest levels were sand and mud, dating to the period when the Coquille estuary was an expansive bay. Fishing weirs found in the mud dated to approximately 800 years ago, demonstrating that the bay had filled or uplifted enough for intertidal fishing to take place by then. People had built the fishing weirs across a tidal channel that drained the once-expansive tidal flats north and inland from the site, a productive setting for fishing throughout the year.

Gradually, the bay continued to fill, beginning with an intertidal "levee" of sand that built along the north bank of the tidal river channel. As more sand accumulated on the levee, it was used more and more as a work station for fishers and eventually became a seasonal camp. The diverse tools recovered from the site attest to the many activities pursued by the Coquille Indians who lived there between 600 and 300 years ago. The weirs in the channel acted as sediment traps, and gradually the tidal channel filled and closed. The outlet to the adjacent tidal flats apparently shifted two hundred meters to the west, where more recent fishing weirs have been identified. Among the tools left behind is an antler wedge for splitting wood, possibly for fish traps and lattice panels used in new channels that opened nearby.

CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE earthquakes, tsunamis, sea-level rise, and related landscape changes have greatly altered the landscape of the Oregon coast as long as people have lived there. Some of these changes were catastrophic events that destroyed villages, such as the subsidence at Nilestun and the landslide at Qa'-i-na'-na-i-tc'-tunne. Other changes were extensive but more gradual, such as the dune shifts at Tseriadun and the infilling of the Kwatami estuary. In estuaries along much of the Oregon coast, CSZ events appear to have expanded tidewater fishing grounds and channels for canoeing, as at the Ahnkuti site in Yaquina Bay and the marshes of the Coquille estuary.

Along with the Native oral tradition portraying great earthquakes and tsunamis on the Oregon coast, the archaeological evidence of the effects of those events on coastal communities is a history that continues to unfold through collaborations among tribal historians, archaeologists, and geologists. As the articles in this special section show, this history does not comprise simple accounts of disaster, response, and recovery. Coastal communities benefited from an intergenerational perspective on CSZ events through the practice of oral tradition, and their knowledge enabled many who lived in vulnerable areas to survive and recover.

Though little known for many years, this history is compelling for what it tells us about the resilience of cultural traditions through periodic upheaval and the sustained ties across generations that continue to shape Native society. This knowledge is also critical in efforts to prepare for CSZ events that will undoubtedly happen in the future. It is unfortunate that Native oral tradition was not better integrated into the region's collective history decades ago. Informed by this knowledge, scientists might have found physical evidence of these catastrophic events much earlier, which may have influenced the design of bridges and buildings and the identification of tsunami hazard zones.

The geological discoveries that eventually revealed the tumultuous legacy of this changing coastal landscape have helped open the way to viewing history through multiple lenses, giving us a perspective that promises to expand and invigorate our understanding and appreciation of Oregon history.

Notes

Many of the research projects discussed in this paper would not have been carried out without the support of the Coquille Indian Tribe, for whom I had the honor of serving as consulting archaeologist for several years. The head of the Coquille Cultural Resources Program, Don Ivy, has led several of these collaborative research projects. University of Oregon professors Jon Erlandson and Madonna Moss served on my doctoral committee and set the stage for the intertidal surveys presented here. Loren Davis, Dennis Griffin, Le Gilsen, Tom Connolly, Robert Kentta, Mark Tveskov, Rob Witter, Sharon Parrish, Denise Hockema, Nicole Norris, Curt Peterson, Jason Younker, Patricia Whereat Phillips, Shirod Younker, Roy Lowe, Dave Pitkin, Reg Pullen, and Beth Piatote have all contributed greatly to this research. Marianne Keddington-Lang was inspired to create this special section, and I appreciate her energy and expertise in carrying it out. Finally, Robert Losey was called on many times to tap his wealth of knowledge on the subject at hand in reviewing and editing this article.

^1. Beverly Ward, White Moccasins ([Cottage Grove, Ore.]: B.H. Ward, 1986), 27. The tsunami accounts in this book are based on interviews with the author's relative, Ida Mecum.

^2. Thomas H. Heaton and S. H. Hartzell, "Source Characteristics of Hypothetical Subduction Earthquakes in the Northwestern United States," Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 76 (1986): 675–708; Brian Atwater, "Evidence for Great Holocene Earthquakes Along the Outer Coast of Washington State," Science 236 (1987): 942–44.

^3. Alan R. Nelson et al., "Radiocarbon Evidence for Extensive Plate-Boundary Rupture About 300 Years Ago at the Cascadia Subduction Zone," Nature 378 (1995): 371–74.

^4. K. Satake et al., "Time and Size of a Giant Earthquake Inferred from Japanese Tsunami Record of January 1700," Nature 379 (1996): 246–49.

^5. Scott Byram and Robert L. Witter, "Wetland Landscapes and Archaeological Sites in the Coquille Estuary, Middle Holocene to Recent Times," in Changing Landscapes: Proceedings of the Third Annual Coquille Indian Tribe Cultural Preservation Conference, 1999, ed. Robert Losey (North Bend, Ore.: Coquille Indian Tribe, 2000); Losey, "Earthquakes and Tsunamis as Elements of Environmental Disturbance on the Northwest Coast of North America," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24 (2005): 101–16; Losey, "Communities and Catastrophe: Tillamook Response to the AD 1700 Earthquake and Tsunami, Northern Oregon Coast" (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, 2001); Donald B. Ivy and R. Scott Byram, "Coquille Cultural Heritage and Wetland Archaeology," in Enduring Records: Proceedings of the 1999 Wetland Archaeological Research Project Conference, ed. Barbara Purdy (England: Oxbow Books, 2001).

^6. John Waters and Norman Collson, interviewed by John Harrington, reel 26, frame 782 of Alsea, Siuslaw, Coos, Southwest Oregon Athapaskan: Vocabularies, Linguistic Notes, Ethnographic and Historical Notes, in John Peabody Harrington Papers, Alaska/Northwest Coast, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

^7. Thomas J. Connolly, R. Scott Byram, and Robert Kentta, "Archaeology Illuminated by History, History Illuminated by Archaeology: Examples from the Oregon Coast," paper presented at the Northwest Anthropological Conference, March 2005.

^8. Robert T. Boyd, ed., Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999).

^9. Loren G. Davis et al., "Evidence for Late Pleistocene Occupation on the Southern Northwest Coast," Journal of Field Archeology 29 (2004): 7–16; Davis, "Geoarchaeological Insights from Indian Sands, a Late Pleistocene Site on the Southern Northwest Coast, USA," Geoarchaeology 21:4 (2006): 20–24. The transition from the Pleistocene Epoch to the Holocene Epoch, an arbitrary time marker established by geologists, is set at 10,000 years ago.

^10. Madonna Moss and Jon Erlandson, "Reflections on North American Pacific Coast Prehistory," Journal of World Prehistory 9 (1995): 1–45.

^11. Madonna L. Moss and Jon M. Erlandson, "Radiocarbon Dates from Native American Archaeological Sites on the Oregon Coast," Current Archaeological Happenings in Oregon 24:3 (1999): 20–24.

^12. R. Scott Byram and John M. Erlandson, "Dune Dynamics and Oregon Coast Archaeological Sites of the Holocene," in Contributions to the Archaeology of Oregon, ed. Brian O'Neill and Guy L. Tasa (forthcoming).

^13. R. Scott Byram, Archaeological Excavations at Tseriadun, 35CU7 for Garrison Lake Outlet Modification, Port Orford, Oregon (Salem, Ore.: Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, Heritage Conservation Division, 2005).

^14. Loren Davis, "Preliminary Geo-archaeological Perspectives on the New River Midden, Southern Oregon Coast" (Corvallis: Oregon State University, Department of Anthropology, 2006); Scott Byram and Donald Ivy, Coquille Indian Tribe Archaeological Site Update Report (National Park Service Historic Preservation Fund, Indian Program, 2004); Jennifer Viksne, "The New Lake Midden Site (35-CS-206), Coos County, Oregon: A Case of Landscape Change" (M.A. thesis, University of Oregon, 2006).

^15. R. Scott Byram, "Brush Fences and Basket Traps: The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Tidewater Weir Fishing on the Oregon Coast" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2002).

^16. Byram, "Brush Fences."

^17. Curt D. Peterson, "Preliminary Reconnaissance Survey of Cascadia Paleo-tsunami Deposits in Yaquina Bay, Oregon," Oregon Geology 57 (1995): 33–40.

^18. John A. Draper, "An Analysis of Lithic Tools and Debitage from 35CS1: A Prehistoric Site on the Southern Oregon Coast," Tebiwa 19 (1982): 47–78.

^19. Robert C. Witter, "Late Holocene Paleoseismicity, Tsunamis and Relative Sea-Level Changes Along the South-Central Cascadia Subduction Zone, Southern Oregon, U.S.A." (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1999); Scott Byram and Robert L. Witter, "Wetland Landscapes."

^20. Scott Byram, et al., Research in Response to Erosion at the Philpott Site (35CS1), Coquille Estuary (Coos Bay, Ore.: Coquille Indian Tribe Cultural Resources Program, 1997); Byram, "Brush Fences"; Byram and Witter, "Wetland Landscapes."

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