Burke Museum archaeology collections are available for research. Collections listed on this form are only a small percentage of the material available for research. Interested researchers should contact Laura Phillips, Archaeology Collection Manager, to obtain information on other available collections, the research process and to schedule an appointment to discuss their individual research plan.

All researchers must complete a Research Request form detailing their project and agree to all listed conditions of access. A one-page description of the proposed research must also be submitted along with the Research Request form. A sample research proposal is available here.

• Settlement and Climate Change in Late Holocene East Timor
• Traditional Food Sources and Diabetes in Puget Sound Native Communities
• How old are Northwest sites?
• Looking for Lewis and Clark
• Sites, Artifacts, and Databases
• Digging for clues on Vashon Island
• Why so many bird wings?

• Just another rock?
• How much water can a rock hold?
• She Who Watches (Tsagagla'lal)
• It's AD 600, what's for dinner?
• Research Across Borders

Since September 2003, Curator Peter Lape and UW students have been working in the eastern Lautem district of the island with traditional landowners, colleagues from the Australian National University, James Cook University and the East Timor Ministry of Culture to map landscape features and identify and test archaeological sites. Current data from Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific suggest a link between the development of fortified settlements and increased climate instability beginning 800 years ago. This project uses a combination of paleoclimate, archaeological and ethnographic research to investigate whether these links also occurred in East Timor. Current work focuses on refining the chronology of the fortification period on the island and testing various models that seek to explain why this shift happened in both the local and the Pacific-wide regional context. For more info, see Dr. Peter Lape's web page.

This project uses archaeological data about past diet in Puget Sound to investigate the causes and possible treatment of Type II diabetes among contemporary Puget Sound Native Americans. Curator Peter Lape was awarded a planning grant for the first phase of the project by the Institute for Ethnic Studies in the US in March 2003. Since then, Burke staff and students have been working with members of the Tulalip, Muckleshoot and Suquamish Tribes to find ways to best use this information about the past for current health concerns. For more info, see the project website.

Curator Dr. Julie Stein received funds to sort and upgrade the storage of collections from the San Juan Islands. During this process, organic materials (charcoal and shell) were pulled and sent to a lab for radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating is a method of finding out how old a once-living object is, by measuring the amount of carbon 14 that it contains. She hopes to develop a detailed chronology of the San Juan Islands based on dates from these and other well-known sites.

Dr. Julie Stein, Roger Kiers, and Laura Phillips conducted geoarchaeological testing at Fort Clatsop National Memorial during the summer of 1998. They hope to find evidence of the location of Lewis and Clark's fort by locating their privies. 

Currently, soil samples are being tested for phosphorus and mercury levels. Since mercury was ingested by members of Lewis and Clark's crew as a treatment for numerous diseases, the presence of mercury in the soil could indicate the location of the privies.

For an archaeologist, discovering a new archaeological site is an exciting event. For a road engineer, however, that discovery could lead to construction delays, cost overruns, and big headaches, as they try to minimize disturbance to these legally protected resources. Civil engineers are usually careful to avoid disturbing archaeological sites by checking beforehand with the State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. But only a small portion of archaeological sites in Washington have been formally registered. In an effort to protect more sites in King County, the King County Roads Services Division asked the Burke Archaeology Department for help. The Burke keeps records of contacts with the public who told us about possible archaeological sites, and in some cases donated artifacts to the museum. These records, while not heavily detailed, do have information about possible sites.

Since June, we have been working with King County Roads Services Division, in cooperation with King County Office of Cultural Resources and the State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, to create a new database and computerized map that will list both registered and unrecorded sites in the county. The King County Archaeological Resources Database (KCARD) will provide valuable information to government agencies, and also to Native American tribes, contract archaeology firms, archaeology researchers and students. To date, information in the Burke Archaeology archives and catalogs have added nearly 200 possible sites to the 197 officially recorded sites in the county. Burke staff are now working on the second phase of the KCARD project: listing details about all of the museum collections from King County sites. While some of these collections are in the Burke, many others are stored in other institutions, making it difficult for researchers to find specific collections. This second phase of the KCARD project is funded by a grant from the King County Landmarks and Heritage Commission.

During the summer of 1996, the staff of the Burke Museum Archaeology Department led a unique archaeological investigation of a shell midden (shell and artifacts that accumulate around a dwelling) at Burton Acres Park on Vashon Island, WA. This project, co-sponsored by the Burke Museum, the King County Landmarks & Heritage Commission, McMurray Middle School, and the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, involved nearly 400 volunteers who helped excavate and sort materials from the site. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the site was used as a fish processing location and summer camp between 1000 and 200 years ago. Researchers at the Burke Museum and the University of Washington analyzed the fish, mammal, and bird bones, the stone tools, the shells, and the historic items recovered during the project. The collection is owned by the Puyallup Tribe.

Kris Bovy (University of Washington), under the direction of Dr. Julie Stein, has studied bird bones excavated at British Camp in the San Juan Islands. She found that there is an unusually high number of bird wing bones at the site (relative to other bird bones). There are a number of hypotheses for why this pattern may exist. For example, do wing bones survive because they are less fragile than other skeletal parts of a bird, such as the skull? Did prehistoric occupants hoard the bird wings for their colorful feathers or bones (used to make tools)?

Philippe LeTourneau and Robert Stone, archaeologists employed at the archaeological firm of BOAS, Inc., Seattle, Washington, analyzed Burke collections with Olcott material, as well as the Marymoor Collection (the artifacts from an excavation at Marymoor Park in Redmond). Olcott artifacts have not been dated in Western Washington, but are believed to have been made between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. Olcott material is characterized by heavily patinated/weathered stone tools, Cascade points, and quartz crystal microblades. The researchers were interested in the Olcott collection because similar material has recently been found by BOAS at a site along the Tolt River, in Washington. They investigated the similarities and differences between the collections to see how they might be related.

Dr. Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist from the University of Oregon Museum of Anthropology, is studying a number of obsidian points from the Bergen Collection. He is trying to determine both the location (source) of the obsidian, and how old the points are, by using a technique called "obsidian hydration." Water is absorbed by stone tools between the time they are made and when they are found. This length of time is estimated from the thickness of the "hydration" layer (the extent to which water has invaded the outside of the stone). Dr. Jenkins is the co-instructor of the University of Oregon Archaeological Field School in the Fort Rock Basin of Oregon.

Joanna Ostapkowicz (curator of the American collections in the Liverpool Museum, UK) researched the petroglyph known as Tsagagla'lal, also called "She Who Watches." The Tsagagla'lal petroglyph/pictograph overlooks the Columbia River at Horsethief Lake State Park, east of Stevenson, Washington. According to Wishram legend, Tsagagla'lal was a chief who was changed into a rock by Coyote to watch over her people. Her image is represented in a number of bone and stone artifacts that were recovered from the Columbia River and are now in Burke Museum collections. 

Brian Pegg (Simon Fraser University) is analyzing fish, bird, and mammal remains from the English Camp site on San Juan Island. He has been able to identify over 2,000 fragments of bone, including elk, deer, seal, beaver, salmon, dogfish, surfperch, herring, gull, loon, and many different kinds of ducks that were taken for food, decoration or raw materials by the prehistoric inhabitants of this site. 

One issue that Brian Pegg is looking into is the destruction of bone in the site by groundwater. As with most Northwest Coast shell middens (heaps), the site at English Camp has a dark layer at the bottom and a lighter layer on top. In 1992, Dr. Julie Stein had conducted research showing that the dark color at the bottom was due to groundwater inundation. Pegg has looked at the animal bones found above and below the water table. The groundwater has tended to dissolve delicate bones, like herring bones, and reduce the size and identifiably of the rest of the animal bones. The result is a lower variety and lower number of bones in the darker zone. For example, the lower levels of the site have fewer herring bones. This is not because people changed the amount of fish they ate over time, just that the fish bones under the water table (in the darker zone) have been preferentially destroyed by groundwater.

In the Spring of 2001, The Burke Museum hosted Nick Araho, Curator of Archaeology at the National Museum of Papua New Guinea. Mr Araho came to the Burke to provide assistance and with The Cole Collection, a group of ethnographic and archaeological materials collected by Associate Curator David Cole in the 1970s.

The original agreement established between Cole and the Papua New Guinea government had been to ultimately split the collection and return half the materials to Papua New Guinea. In the interceding years, political conflict and the lack of a local curation facility in Papua New Guinea prevented the move of half the collection. The establishment of the Papua New Guinea Museum provided the facility, but the halving of the collection required the representation and expertise of a Papua New Guinea archaeologist.

The University of Washington Graduate School generously provided the funds to bring that Papua New Guinea archaeologist, Nick Araho. Mr. Araho's expertise provided insight on how the Cole collection could be divided without rendering the collection too fragmentary to be useful. Together with Burke Archaeology Curator Peter Lape, the Burke Museum and the Papua New Guinea Museum have begun to negotiate a comprehensive plan to share the collection.