The Pacific Northwest is a region in the northwest of North America, bound by the Pacific Ocean to the west. There are several partially overlapping definitions of the region, but they generally include the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon, and often including Southeast Alaska, Idaho, western Montana and northernmost California. The term "Pacific Northwest" should not be confused with the Northwest Territory (also known as the Great Northwest, a historic term in the United States) or the Northwest Territories of Canada.

The term Northwest Coast is often used when referring only to the coastal regions. The term Northwest Plateau has been used to describe the inland regions, although they are commonly referred to as "the Interior" in British Columbia and the Inland Empire in the United States. The region's biggest metropolitan areas are Seattle/Tacoma, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Portland, Oregon.

The Pacific Northwest was occupied by a diverse array of Native American peoples for millennia, beginning with Paleoindians who explored and colonized the area roughly 15,000 years before Europeans arrived. The Pacific Coast is seen by a growing number of scholars as a major migration route for late Pleistocene peoples moving from northeast Asia into the Americas. Archaeological evidence for these earliest Native Americans is sketchy--in part because heavy glaciation, flooding, and post-glacial sea level rise have radically changed the landscape--but fluted Clovis-like points found in the region were probably left by Paleoindians at least 13,000 years ago.

Even earlier evidence for human occupation dating back as much as 14,500 years ago is emerging from Paisley Caves in central Oregon.

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