Bethany Mathews

Research Interests:

Northwest Coast and Great Basin prehistory, Western U.S. ethnohistory, paleoethnobotany, human ecology, waterlogged archaeology, cultural resource management.

Master's Research:

My MA thesis focuses on human ecology of the Pleistocene-Holocene environmental transition in the northern Great Basin and southern Columbia Plateau. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental data will be used to empirically test theories of hunter-gatherer landscape-use patterning at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. This region-specific study contributes to a larger theoretical concept that examines the potential of wetlands as stable places in the otherwise dynamic global landscape of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.

Publications:

In review. Contribution to Macroflora section of Mud Bay 1999-2009 site report. Anthropology Department, South Puget Sound Community College, Olympia, WA.

2010  Balanophagy in the Pacific Northwest: The Acorn-Leaching Pits at the Sunken Village Wetsite. Journal of Northwest Anthropology. 43: 125-140.

2009  Acorns and Acorn-Leaching Pits. In Sunken Village, Sauvie Island, Oregon USA: A Report on the 2006-2007 Investigations of National Historic Landmark Wet Site 35MU4, edited by Dale R. Croes, John L. Fagan, and Maureen Newman Zehendner, pp. 85-94. Journal of Wetland Archaeology, 9. Oxbow Books, University of Exeter, England.

Conference Presentations:

2010 Mathews, Bethany K. and Leroy Keener. "The greatest of all delicacies": Waterlogged Archaeology and the Search for Ancient Food Preference on the Northwest Coast of North America, Society for Ethnobiology Annual Meeting, Victoria, B.C., 7 May.

2008  Acorn Leaching Pits, Oak Woodlands and Comparative Ethnography of the Northwest Coast, presented at American Society for Ethnohistory Conference in Eugene, OR, November 13.

2008  Balanophagy in the Pacific Northwest: The Acorn-Leaching Pits at the Sunken Village Wet Site 35MU4 and Comparative Ethnography of Acorn Use, presented at 73rd Annual Society for American Archaeology Meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 28.

2007  The Acorn-Leaching Pits of Sauvie Island: Macroflora Analysis, Comparison of Regional Acorn Use, and Human Population Size Estimate, presented at 60th Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference in Pullman, WA, March 15.