Melissa Darby holds her Master of Arts degree in Anthropology (PSU 1996), Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology, History, and a Middle East Studies Certificate (PSU 1980). Darby is a leading authority on the Native American use of Sagittaria latifolia, an edible root which is commonly known as wapato. Darby is a cultural resource management consultant and has worked for over forty years as an archaeologist and historian in Oregon and Washington. Her research on Native American cultures of the region include important works on settlement patterns, vernacular architecture, and plant foods used by indigenous people of the region. She has contributed substantially to our understanding of the Native peoples and the world they inhabited prior to European incursion. The University of Utah Press published her book Thunder Go North, the Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay in 2019. This study chronicles the long-standing controversy over where Drake and company in the Golden Hind landed and spent most of the summer of 1579. This work also exposes the intrigues of some of the California booster groups and historians employed to obscure the facts of Drake’s voyage on the west coast of America.
Selected Works:
- 2021. "New Light on the Antiquity of Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa) From Francis Drake’s Exploration of the Northwest Coast." Journal of Northwest Anthropology, Fall 2021.
- 2019. Thunder Go North, The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake.
- 2014. "Old John: A Portrait of Persistence." Alis Volat Propriis, Tales from the Oregon Territory, 1848-1859. Chelsea Rose, Mark Axel Tveskov, eds., Association of Oregon Archaeologists, Occasional Papers No. 9. Museum of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon.
- 2014. "Old John’s Plank Houses and Some Notes on Southern Northwest Coast Vernacular Architecture." CAHO, Current Archaeological Happenings in Oregon. Vol. 39, no. 1.
- 2006. "The Intensification of Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) by the Chinookan People of the Lower Columbia River" in Keeping it Living; Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America, Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner, editors.