There is a considerable amount of unpublished source material on Kalapuyan ethnography. This consists primarily of manuscript field notes from three linguistically trained scholars: Albert S. Gatschet, who collected Kalapuyan linguistic and ethnographic data during a visit to Grand Ronde Reservation in 1877, Leo J. Frachtenberg, who worked with a number of Kalapuyan informants from 1913 to 1915, and Melville Jacobs, who worked with the last surviving speakers of Kalapuyan languages during a number of sessions between 1928 and 1936. Data from these three authorities, plus other available data, reveal many details about aboriginal Kalapuyan life (“aboriginal” here referring to the period from around first White contact until removal to the reservation). Any attempt to reconstruct ethnographic descriptions of the aboriginal Kalapuyans should fully utilize these available data. I intend this thesis as a beginning effort toward that end. It seemed to me that the ethnographic notes scattered through the Gatschet manuscripts, representing as they do the knowledge of informants who had reached adulthood under pre-reservation conditions, would prove particularly interesting in terms of ethnographic reconstruction. Thus, I selected the Tualatin Kalapuyans, the subject of Gatschet’s main effort, as my own focus. In view of the quantity of data involved, I further restricted my scope to much less than an overall ethnographic description of the aboriginal Tualatin. I have concentrated upon two related aspects of that larger picture -- subsistence and ethnobiology. Under the former, I consider aboriginal habitat, general subsistence economy, territorial and seasonal availability of subsistence resources, seasonal cycles involved in harvest of resources, subsistence-related aspects of regional interrelationships such as trade, and specific subsistence-related activities and practices. Under ethnobiology, I consider native knowledge and uses of plant and animal resources. In Chapter IV, some additional ethnographic information unrelated to these two main areas is also presented concerning the identification and localization of Tualatin winter-village groups.

My research examines the prehistoric subsistence of native peoples of the Willamette Valley, Oregon through an analysis of the regional zooarchaeological records, and then modeling regional diet breadth. Through this analysis, I challenge commonly held stereotypes that the indigenous people of the Willamette Valley were strictly root eaters, and the basis for this claim, that salmon were not part of Native subsistence. The results of my research indicate that given the incomplete nature of the ethnohistoric record, very little can be said about expected cultural behaviors, such as salmon consumption, that appear to be absent in the Willamette Valley. In addition, since the faunal assemblage is so small in the Willamette Valley, zooarchaeological data are simply inadequate for studying the relationship between prehistoric peoples and their animal resources. Finally, optimal foraging modeling suggests that salmon is one of the higher ranked resources available to the Native People of the Willamette Valley.