ARHAEOLOGICAL FEATURES
Location and Environment * Chinookan Culture * Chinookan Material Culture
Site Chronology * The Plankhouse * The Meier Site Excavations * Features * Artifact Photo Gallery
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Archaeological excavations generally discover two main classes of phenomena; artifacts are objects which have been altered and/or used in any way by humans. Artifacts, then, are such discrete items as stone tools, bone ornaments, rocks moved from a riverbed to a hearth inside a house, and so on. As important as artifacts are features; these may loosely be defined as arrangements of matter which reflect human activity, such as post-holes and pits dug into the ground (whether or not they contain anything), piles of rock which are in some way associated, fireplaces, caches of tools or valuable items, and so on.

This page introduces some of the main types of features encountered at the Meier site. A schematic illustration of the Meier features is presented below.

For each feature type below, I provide a general description as well as a rendering (made with 'Bryce 4' software on a Mac Power PC) which depicts a 'holotypical' representation of that feature type. These holotypes are provided as thinking devices, and to point out the distinctiveness of these feature types from one another. Click on the features below for details.

Posts and Plank Features	Pit Features
Hearth Features	Features found in the Midden