Note to Moderators: if I've made some mistake in the rules please let me know and I'll make an adjustment. I mostly lurk here, but I understand you're quite strict and I'd hate to have this all deleted.

Hey there,

Go ahead and cross post this to /r/askanthropology because they will have the experts you need.

Second, consider explaining why you've asked this question, because there may be some more interesting factoids if you expand your range of time a little bit. Both 1000BCE and 1000CE fall within the Late Holocene (1500BCE-1775CE).

The Northern Pacific cultures we are familiar with today (thanks Franz Boas!) were well on track by 6,000 years ago. By 1800BCE there were already simple ranked societies (as a cultural anthropologist I tend to buck the archaeological terminology such as 'simple' but I'll do my best to repeat what the textbooks tell you). Essentially because food resources like salmon were extremely seasonal, society stratified into hierarchy by necessity in order to create effective food storage and dispersion over the year.

Following 1800BCE, ranking became continually more elaborate. Households tended to be matrilineal (organized around ties to one's mother, her mother, etc) although social units were headed by men. Farther south (which I believe includes Oregon in the context of my reading) there were some episodes of patrilineal households and ranked polygamy, but generally these systems were more unstable. Boom and bust. Again, I'm no expert, but I'll have to disagree with wildfire's comment below and say that you'll probably see planked cedar houses and possibly totem poles as early as 1000BCE. Their prevalence and elaboration is another matter(yeah, nope). On a side note, the issue with this whole area/time period is that sea levels rose dramatically and most likely destroyed the vast majority of available evidence, leaving archaeologists with shell middens and the houses of weirdos that built far away from shore.

To more directly answer your question: The more evidence you see for ranking and heirarchy, the later you probably are. One smoking gun might be the creation of burial mounds. A few of these were undertaken in the area around 1000CE, but there were none before that as far as we know. Burial mounds are large heaps of earth. It's unlikely you would catch anyone in the act of making them (they're actually quite fast to make) but you might see signs of a large mass of disturbed earth that doesn't match the geological terrain. However, I think you would be lucky to run into one because my impression is that they were quite rare. Better to just make some friends and watch for signs of heightened hierarchy (some people have more free time, specialization, accumulation of wealth, competition between groups).

Again, try cross posting to askanthrpology because you'll be much more likely to get an expert on those date ranges in that subreddit.

Thanks!

Edit: SOURCE.

Edit 2: Putting the moderator note on top...

Edit 3: /u/retarredroof gives a great critique of what I've said here (see below). In particular I want to draw attention to a possibly much more foolproof means of answering the question which they point out. Technology is always the archaeologists go-to, and leave it to a cultural anth guy to totally overlook this in favor of nebulous social relationships which there is less evidence for:

The main difference I would anticipate between 3000 years ago and 1000 years ago on the Oregon coast would be the increased use of the specialized technologies for salmon and other anadromous species (e.g. salmon dams, fish nets, fish and lamprey traps, composite harpoons) and the onset and/or adoption of the classic NW Coast village with the use of large coastal towns by 1000 years ago. Lyman sees a transition from pit houses, like those that persist in interior Oregon until contact, to plank houses during the period of interest on the coast. Social stratification increases through time and it would not surprise me if slavery was in use by 1000 years ago. Also during this period there is a slow transition from flaked stone technology to ground stone use for harpoon and other points.

People, remember that this is askHISTORIANS, not askpaleoastronomers or askgeologists or askbotanists. If you do not have the proper historical knowledge to answer this question, don't answer.

Since the topic doesn't specify which part of Oregon we're talking about here, I can give some perspective on the Great Basin portion of eastern Oregon (whereas most of the posts have dealt with coastal Oregon).

The Great Basin is a semi-arid environment where the archaeological record supports a continuous record of hunter-gatherer lifestyles from at least 10,000BP into historic times. This seemingly unchanging record led some of the early researchers to believe that there was no culture change in this region throughout prehistory, but archaeologists now know that this was not the case.

In the time periods you have designated (3,000BP to 1,000BP) there are actually some quite significant changes in the way that people lived.

1. The shift from atlatl and dart to bow and arrow technology. This is evidenced by the reduced size in projectile points and the cases of preserved bows that have been found in similar contexts. I think the most commonly attributed date to the introduction of the bow is around 1,350BP in the Great Basin. The bow and arrow changed the game of hunting, it made individual hunters more viable whereas the atlatl likely required a group effort. The bow was also more accurate, which made hunting (a costly endeavor compared to seed procurement) more efficient. In some areas, the switch to arrow points reduced the amount of raw material procurement, and thus settlement patterns, as these smaller points required less material to make, but this was primarily in areas where obsidian and other high quality toolstone were rare. The northwestern basin has many obsidian sources, so I doubt this was the case here.

2. Settlement and subsistence. I don't know too much about this in Oregon specifically, but I will be talking about the patterns seen just about 50 miles south of the Oregon border. I wouldn't be surprised if the exact same things were happening further north at the same time, or at least something very similar. Somewhere between 1,300BP and 1,000BP we begin to see the intensification of upland food resources, primarily roots. Previously, the uplands were mainly hunting grounds, evidenced by older remains being that of hunting material (projectile points). During this period, we see an explosion of ground stone tools (millingstones and handstones). It is absolutely everywhere in late period sites and almost nonexistent in earlier sites. Roots are fairly abundant in these upland areas and it appears that they were incorporated into the diet in a big way. Not to get into optimal foraging or diet breadth too much, but for one reason or another these lower ranked resources presumably had to be added to the diet. Depletion of higher ranked resources, environmental conditions, population pressure are all reasonable explanations.

3. The Numic Spread. I'm getting a little ahead of myself with this one, but I think it's worth mentioning. One of the major problems researchers faced in the Great Basin was explaining how the Numic language group had managed to become so widespread (essentially the entire Great Basin and then some at historic times) without significant divergence. Glottochronology would suggest that this language group had not spent all that much time apart from each other. In this case, the Numic hunter-gatherers were a recent inclusion into the Great Basin and spread across it rather quickly. Since we have an archaeological record dating back 10,000 years this means that the Numic speakers must have displaced the previous inhabitants of the Great Basin. The most convincing argument states that the Numic expansion began about 700BP from southeastern California. While some have argued that the expansion began earlier (perhaps 1,500BP), and some MUCH earlier (4,000BP), the aforementioned date of 700BP is the one best supported by glottochronology and the archaeological record. So as I said, I was getting ahead of myself since this doesn't particularly pertain to the dates in this question. Most evidence points to Numic speakers arriving in the northern Great Basin damn near historic times (300-200 years ago). The reason I included this was to illustrate just how variable prehistory could be in the Great Basin, even when discussing the seemingly "simple" lives of hunter-gatherers.

So if you visited eastern Oregon in 3,000BP you would have seen a more sparsely populated area who's inhabitants hunted with the atlatl and focused primarily on lowland seeds and big game animals for subsistence. If you revisited this same area two thousand years later you would likely notice that the population density had increased, higher ranked resources (big game animals) were largely depleted, and encampments in the uplands had become common. Ground stone tools had become much more common and they were used for intensive processing of roots. The atlatl has been replaced with the bow, and while it has made hunters more successful, there is now less to hunt. Smaller game is likely being pursued at much greater rates with the depletion of larger game. Later in time, you would see a new ethnic group moving into the area and out competing the previous inhabitants. Some warfare may be present, but it appears that these intruders are simply better adapted to the conditions of the habitat. Using specialized technology for seed processing, the intruders would drive out or assimilate the previous inhabitants with their superior exploitation of the natural resources.

Bettinger, Robert L., and Martin A. Baumhoff 1982 The Numic Spread: Great Basin Cultures in Competition. American Antiquity 47(3): 485–503.

Bettinger, Robert L., and Jelmer Eerkens 1999 Point Typologies, Cultural Transmission, and the Spread of Bow-and-Arrow Technology in the Prehistoric Great Basin. American Antiquity 64(2): 231–242.

Delacorte, Michael G. 2002 Late Prehistoric Resource Intensification in the Northwest Great Basin. In Boundary Lands: Archaeological Investigations Along The California-Great Basin Interface, edited by Kelly R. McGuire, pp 41-48

I apologize if this was a difficult read. Its my first post to AskHistorians and I really rushed it to get it done before bed. There was a lot more I could have covered, so I may revisit this post tomorrow. Hope it was interesting to at least one other person!

You might not care, but I thought I'd mention that you're mixing dating systems.

BCE goes with CE, and refers to Before the Common Era and Common Era, whereas BC goes with AD, and refers to Before Christ and Anno Domini.