Pacific Coast and Islands

Archeologists at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa and National Park Service staff at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park want to know more about the stone walls - kuaiwi - in the Kaʻū Field System. Why did ancient Hawaiians build them and what can they teach modern farmers about cultivating a more sustainable future?

From the mid-1800's to early 1900's, Chinese and Japanese fishermen harvested abalone around the Channel Islands. Archeology has uncovered what daily life was like for these individuals as they worked and camped on the islands.

While the site of Fort Astoria in Oregon has been listed as a National Historic Landmark (NHL) since the 1960s, archaeologists had never performed methodical excavations at the site. In 2020, the regional NHL program published a report from an archaeology field school that detailed three archaeological sites associated with the NHL. This work greatly expanded our understanding of the fur trade and its aftermath at the mouth of the Columbia River.

The Tamál-Húye Archeological Project focuses on intercultural interactions and processes of culture change and continuity in sixteenth-century northern California resulting from the shipwreck of the Manila galleon San Agustín, which occurred in tamál-húye, the Coast Miwok name for present-day Drakes Bay, in Point Reyes National Seashore, in 1595.

Join University of Hawaii - West Oahu's archaeological field school at Honouliuli National Monument. The monument, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was the site of Japanese civilian and Prisoner of War internment during World War II (1943 - 1946).

Fort Vancouver, as the colonial “Capital” of the Pacific Northwest in the 1820s-1840s, supported a multi-ethnic village of 600-1,000 occupants. A number of the villagers were Hawaiian men who worked in the agricultural fields and sawmills of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) operations. Identification of Hawaiian residences and activities has been an important element of studies of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

Overseen and operated by the National Park Service, the sites at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Minidoka were examined by NPS archeologist Jeff Burton and his team between 1993 and 1999, along with the seven other camps and isolation and assembly centers associated with Japanese American incarceration and relocation.

Nihoa and Mokumanumanu (Necker) Islands contain heiau (temples), living sites, and agricultural terraces. Recent studies that unite archeological analyses with oral histories have uncovered the roles these islands played within Hawaiian rituals of the past.

The Village is a locus for exploring colonial identity and change associated with the globalized fur trade. The material culture tells us about human use of space, investment in their houses, and ceramic usage. Through archeology, we understand more about the spatial arrangement, landscape use, and development of the Village over time, the residents’ investment in and maintenance of their homes, and the relationship of ceramics to ethnicity and economic status.

Kalaupapa National Historical Park, on Molokai Island, is best known as the isolated peninsula where people afflicted with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) were sent between the years 1866-1965. However, the park also preserves thousands of archeological features which represent pre-leprosy settlement life. In April and May 2013, cultural resource staff from Kalaupapa National Historical Park inventoried a remote landshelf on Molokai’s north shore, called Kuka’iwa’a.