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From paradigms to practices: Pursuing horizontal and long-term relationships with Indigenous Peoples for Archaeological Heritage Management
No full textDespite paradigmatic statements arguing for a collaborative archaeology, little agreement exists concerning how it should be practiced. In our experience, the relationships between archaeologists and the communities we serve are multi-faceted, and often develop under significant constraints concerning project goals and methodologies. Recognizing this, here we focus on the nature of relationships on the ground between archaeologists and indigenous communities. We argue that two principles should guide our practices. First, archaeologists should pursue horizontal relationships with First Nations that build and expand egalitarian contexts within the otherwise hierarchical political structures of modern nation states. Second, it is through building long-term relationships with communities, and the negotiations these require, that horizontal relations can best be established. Both can help improve archaeological practice. We outline two cases of collaboration involving Coast Salish and Interior Salish groups to illustrate our approach.ArticlePeer reviewedPublishe
Anarchism and the archaeology of anarchic societies: Resistance to centralization in the Coast Salish Region of the Pacific Northwest Coast
Get PDFThroughout human history, people have lived in societies without formalized government. We argue that the theory of anarchism presents a productive framework for analyzing decentralized societies. Anarchism encompasses a broad array of interrelated principles for organizing societies without the centralization of authority. Moreover, its theory of history emphasizes an ongoing and active resistance to concentrations of power. We present an anarchist analysis of the development of social power, authority, and status within the Coast Salish region of the Northwest Coast.
Coast Salish peoples exhibited complex displays of chiefly authority and class stratification but without centralized political organization. Ethnographically, their sociopolitical formation is unique in allowing a majority of "high- class" people and a minority of commoners and slaves, or what Wayne Suttles described as an "inverted-pear" society. We present the development of this sociopolitical structure through an analysis of cranial deformation from burial data and assess it in relation to periods of warfare. We determine that many aspects of Coast Salish culture include practices that resist concentrations of power. Our central point is that anarchism is useful for understanding decentralized (or anarchic) networks-those that allow for complex intergroup relations while staving off the establishment of centralized political authority.Peer reviewe
INTENSIFYING WITH FIRE: FLORAL RESOURCE USE AND LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT BY THE PRECONTACT COAST SALISH OF SOUTHWESTERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.), Department of Anthropology, Washington State UniversityAt European contact, indigenous societies of the Northwest Coast employed complex rules governing land tenure and resource ownership, especially as such rules related to food production. While the intensive exploitation of salmon and other marine resources was a critical element of Northwest Coast economies for millennia, I argue that plants were also intensified and actively managed, but in a different way than marine resources. This dissertation investigates resource production by considering investment in terrestrial landscapes and floral resources by the precontact Coast Salish of the Gulf of Georgia during the last 5,000 years. I argue that understanding changes in human-environmental interactions and how terrestrial landscapes were constructed and managed is crucial to the discussion of how and when social complexity was established in the region. The coastal island environments of the southwestern British Columbia contain spatially and temporally constrained resources that can easily be overexploited during times of increased human population. Through terrestrial land management practices precontact Coast Salish peoples were able to adequately control and maintain plant resource patches without overexploitation. In the Pacific Northwest, anthropogenic fire was one tool used to enhance resource production and bolster the productivity of terrestrial landscapes. In applying fire, the structure of vegetation communities and terrestrial landscapes were altered and became more "humanized". Increased investment in landscape maintenance through anthropogenic burning is apparent at the Shingle Point archaeological site (DgRv-002) on Valdes Island over the last 4,500 years. Charcoal counts and morphologies derived from 1 cm samples of sediment cores from two separate locations on Valdes Island establish important differences between human and natural fire signals during the last five millennia. The methodology I have developed here focuses on both morphology and total charcoal counts and provides a means to address problems with discriminating human-set from naturally ignited fire events in the Pacific Northwest.Department of Anthropology, Washington State Universit
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Fish and complexity faunal analysis at the shell midden component of site DGRV-006, Galiano Island, B.C.
Get PDFStudies of the development of social complexity and inequality on the Northwest Coast have focused on the inter-connectedness of subsistence practices and social changes. Several early studies proposed a linear model for the development of complexity, where increasingly complex social relations were accompanied by shifts in subsistence activities. These models hypothesize that a peak in complex social relationships was paired with a specialized salmon economy in the Marpole Period (2500-1000 BP), with a change in social relationships accompanied by a more diverse fishing strategy in the Late Period (1000 BP-contact). Close scrutiny of the empirical data used to support this linear complexity model has prompted calls for a more nuanced approach to understanding the basis for Northwest Coast complexity. For example, many of the originally perceived changes in subsistence may actually be attributed to changes in environmental productivity. Despite such critiques, these models offer a frame of reference against which patterning in faunal assemblages can be evaluated, illuminating the ways in which we might better explore the relationships between socio-cultural shifts and subsistence strategies. In this study, faunal remains from the shell midden component of site DgRv-006 are examined. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the age of the midden deposits overlap with both a Late Period plankhouse at DgRv-006, and site DgRv-003, a nearby Marpole-age plankhouse village. The shift in subsistence posited to occur between the Marpole and Late Period in the linear model should be evident within the midden deposits, allowing us to directly address the connection between social and subsistence changes for this important location over the long term. Results of the analyses undertaken in this study do not support salmon specialization in the Marpole faunal assemblage, and fish remains overall show a consistent diverse pattern in both time periods, indicating that social changes and subsistence shifts may not be as closely correlated as past models have posited. This study also explores several methodological issues related to faunal analyses from shell midden contexts, including the use of bulk samples for correcting sample counts, emphasizing proper quantification techniques, and the use of correspondence analysis to address shell midden life histories
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Avians and diversity a multi-analytical approach to avian faunal analysis in Southwestern British Columbia
Get PDFStudies of social complexity and subsistence practices on the Northwest Coast have focused primarily on intensification of marine and intertidal resources. Much of this research emphasizes intensification as a strategy, which then leads to social complexity. However, more recent research stresses that change in subsistence strategies must be examined at the local level. In this thesis, I analyze avian remains from four assemblages within two locales in the Salish Sea region. The purpose of this study is to identify potential subsistence strategies in diversity of avian acquisition between temporal (Marpole versus Late), spatial (inter-site versus intra-site) and context (plankhouse village versus midden deposits) elements. Using zooarchaeological methods and exploratory statistical analyses, I formulate three hypotheses of avian acquisition: 1) diversity is a result of specialization with specific resources (a low expected diversity); 2) diversity is a result of exploitation in local and single environments (a medium diversity); 3) diversity is a result of opportunistic collection form a variety of environments (a high diversity). Further, these hypotheses allow me to demonstrate that diversity in avian remains was emphasized in acquisition of avian species. I conclude that a multitude of microenvironments were exploited within these two locales across both temporal periods. These conclusions are then connected to broader themes of resource ownership and landscape manipulation, which likely played a large role in avian acquisition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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A relational perspective on dogs and their burials from DGRV-006 coastal southwestern British Columbia
Get PDFBetween the 2010 and 2013 field seasons, five dog burials and a number of isolated canid remains were recovered from Parry Lagoon Midden (DgRv-006) at the Dionisio Point archaeological locality, southwestern Coastal British Columbia. I analyze the individual dogs within these burials and build osteometric profiles of dogs using estimations of shoulder height and body mass, age and sex classifications, and markings of trauma or pathologies. Using a comparative osteometric dataset from the Northwest Coast, and drawing on the ethnographic and ethnohistoric records, I formulate and evaluate five hypotheses: 1) humans actively maintained dog populations; 2) dogs were actively cared for and well-nourished; 3) dogs were not raised as a food resource; 4) two breeds of dogs are present in the sample; and 5) dogs had the potential to operate as non-human persons within Coast Salish society. I further attempt to link their treatment and burial to emic perceptions of dogs by exploring themes within Coast Salish ontologies. I conclude that dogs were actively maintained, selectively bred, well cared for, and not raised for consumption, and that sample variation is within the range of other Northwest Coast samples but is not structured by the existence of two distinct types. Further, certain dogs were considered non-human persons within the Salish cosmology and were afforded burial rights similar to humans in a locale that acted as a formal place of human burial
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