pip. ^o.' 23]' SHEEP ISLAND OSBORNE, BRYAN, CRABTREE 301 



mature theorization and the formulation of problems. It provides 

 trial balloons which may be sniped at or observed. 



There is slovrly accumulating in the Plateau a backlog of excava- 

 tions which, as they are written and published, will draw the think- 

 ing and working hours of more and more anthropologists into 

 problems that are now largely esoteric. Sites that can give informa- 

 tion on cultural sequences in the most easily readable manner, by 

 stratigraphy, are few here. Consequently our knowledge of material 

 culture changes, even limited local ones, are few. There does seem 

 to stand out, however, as an aspect of very old local culture, the basalt 

 industry which made use of large blades, large points, and, in its 

 termmal phases, points of the Wallula Eectangular-Stemmed type 

 made of basalt that probably led directly to the finer, exaggerated, 

 later Columbia points. 



Some data on the basalt forms are given here; other information 

 exists, which cannot well be presented in this report (Crabtree, MS, 

 1957). Basalt chipping has been an aspect of Northwest Indian 

 culture in the Northern Plateau and Coast in recent times. It also 

 flourished, apparently as a complex of greater age, in the Lake Tahoe 

 region of the Central Sierra Nevada (Heizer and Elsasser, 1953). 

 Certainly problems of magnitude exist here: Is the old basalt 

 industry with which we are coming to grips in the American Plateau 

 related to the use of that material in the North and on the Coast? 

 If so, how ? Is our material, or are both ours and the Northern and 

 Coastal and the Californian, a part of an old and widespread com- 

 plex? Can we add to this the material from the desert cultures (this 

 paragraph was written in 1953) of California and some of the pieces 

 sketchily recorded by Osborne in 1941? Following this line of 

 thought, a plan for acheological work along the eastern slopes of the 

 Cascades from Central California north through Oregon and the 

 means to carry it out would certainly reveal many facts pertinent to 

 the development of culture in the Plateau. The Sahaptin connections, 

 through the Moale and Modoc (Jacobs, 1931, Introduction), provide 

 a broad path which, though much overgrown, may still lead back to 

 the origins of much of Plateau stock and culture. Perhaps recently 

 perfected linguistic teclmiques will aid in this respect. 



One thing is certain, that is that the tracing of separate Salish and 

 Sahaptin cultural developments in the Plateau is not now an archeo- 

 logical problem. A great deal can be done historically with linguistic 

 techniques, but the fact that the basic Plateau material culture was, 

 as far as we know now, equally Salish and Sahaptin, renders a solely 

 archeologic assignment of sites to speakers of either language group 

 an impossibility. The archeologist's responsibility, at least here and 

 now, is the historiographic study of culture growth and change in 

 the area. 



52ft583r-H(H 23 



