Imagining the Multilayered Cultural Landscape: A Template from the Columbia Plateau of North America

Cultural landscapes encompass a diversity of manifestations of the interaction between humankind and the natural environment occurring in both space and time. In some instances where the human occupation of a specific area or region encompass a continuous and extended timeframe, successive cultural layers yield contrasting and disparate landscapes and heritage values. This “layering” of past cultural landscapes often leads to conflicting modern-day land, cultural resource management, and heritage value issues. A case study is presented from the Hanford Site in south-central Washington state, USA, where the natural landscape comprises prehistoric Native American, historic ethnographic, and historic period non-Indian evidence from over 10,000 years of occupation and use that clearly separate into several culturally and chronologically defined and overlapping cultural landscapes, which can be visualized as layered entities occurring on the same physical space.