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Evolutionary household archaeology: Inter-generational cultural transmission at housepit 54, Bridge River site, British Columbia
Abstract
Anthropologists have recognized that households may have diverse histories resulting in patterns of unstable membership, a wide array of tactics for production of food and goods, and diverse rules governing the reproduction of cultural traditions and the transmission of rights and resources. Yet archaeologists rarely have the opportunity to test alternative hypotheses about the histories of specific houses and house groups. In this paper, we offer a test of multiple hypotheses regarding the nature of household groups at Housepit 54, Bridge River, British Columbia. Phylogenetic analysis permits us to assess cultural transmission patterns and examine the relationships between household history and socio-economic variables. We conclude that Housepit 54 represents a long-lived house group or “House” that benefited from a well-developed system of inter-generational cultural inheritance. We argue that such groups may have been typical of the Mid-Fraser villages pre-dating 1000 years ago. This in turn allows us to suggest that this pattern was not the result of historically recent borrowing of such concepts from Northwest Coast groups.
... There was a relatively rich body of archeological and ethnographic data to piece together aspects of St'at'imc land-use histories. Archeological surveys and excavations spanning decades have highlighted the extensive use and occupation of the McKay Creek region by people for millennia (Prentiss and Kuijt, 2012;Prentiss et al., 2014Prentiss et al., , 2020. Archeological data provided glimpses into pre-colonial seasonal rounds and broad usage of fish, plant, animals. ...
As environmental injustices and their disproportionate harms to Indigenous communities are increasingly acknowledged, restoration strategies are being deployed widely by environmental NGOs, resource extraction industries, and government agencies. The inclusion of Indigenous communities and their knowledges in restoration efforts are often considered progress in the pursuit of ecological reconciliation. However, in some cases we have observed a lack of meaningful progress as settler colonial prescriptions for land-healing can eschew efforts to decolonize ecological restoration — what we have labeled “pop-up restoration.” We consider two restoration efforts underway in St’at’imc and Quw’utsun territories (Canada) and contrast them with what we are learning alongside the communities’ own values and efforts to reclaim and revitalize food systems throughout forest, wetland, and grassland systems. Utilizing culturally appropriate pathways, we then evaluate how applying an Indigenous Food Systems lens to ecological restoration may provide a framework to remedy pop-up restoration, confronting settler colonial aspirations to transform Indigenous homelands while asserting justice in ecological restoration contexts.
... Floors IIf-IIl reflect a larger rectangular-shaped house (occupied by populations that could have ranged between about 10 and 30), while floors IIa-IIe represent the house at full size, an approximate 13 m diameter oval, with house populations estimated between about 25 and 45 [26,37]. Prentiss et al. [54] provide a phylogenetic model suggesting that rules for social interactions evolved from a communalistic (IIh-IIl) to a more collectivist (IIa-IIg) social strategy. This suggests that over time families shifted from communal cooking and sharing of other work (communalist) to separation into distinct family work spaces (collectivist). ...
Persistent institutionalized inequality (PII) emerged at the Bridge River site by ca 1200–1300 years ago. Research confirms that PII developed at a time of population packing associated with unstable fluctuations in a critical food resource (anadromous salmon) and persisted across multiple generations. While we understand the demographic and ecological conditions under which this history unfolded, we have yet to address details of the underlying social process. In this paper, we draw on Bridge River's Housepit 54 to examine two alternative hypotheses. Hypothesis 1, mutualism, suggests that household heads signalled to maintain and attract new members as a means of supporting the demographic viability of the house. Inequality is indicated by variation in prestige markers but less obviously in economic fundamentals. Hypothesis 2, coercion, asserts that the more successful households developed control over access to critical food resources, forcing others into the choice between emigration and subjugation. Inequality is indicated by inter-family differences in prestige markers and economic fundamentals. Results suggest that inequality emerged under a mutualism scenario but persisted for subsequent generations under more coercive conditions.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.
... I have explored relationships between demography, subsistence, and social change in village-scale settlements using theoretical models drawn from HBE including foraging theory, demographic ecology, and socioecology (145). CTT is very useful in helping us to understand intergenerational change in cultural practices as with the evolution of house architecture and tool-making traditions within and between communities (84,146). EES-aligned frameworks (e.g., punctuated equilibria, evo-devo, exaptation, niche construction, and ecological inheritance) are critical for the study of cultural change across long timescales where data might span lithic scatters to urban centers (111,118,119,147). ...
The study of cultural evolution now includes multiple theoretical frameworks. Despite common influence from Darwinian evolutionary theory, there is considerable diversity. Thus, we recognize those most influenced by the tenets of the Modern Synthesis (evolutionary archaeology, cultural transmission theory, and human behavioral ecology) and those most aligned more closely with concepts emerging in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (cultural macroevolution and evolutionary cognitive archaeology). There has been substantial debate between adherents of these schools of thought as to their appropriateness and priority for addressing the fundamentals of cultural evolution. I argue that theoretical diversity is necessary to address research questions arising from a complex archaeological record. Concepts associated with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis may offer unique insights into the cultural evolutionary process.
This Element provides an overview of pre-modern and ancient economies of the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The region is widely known for its densely occupied semisedentary villages, intensive production economies, dramatic ritual life, and complex social relations. Scholars recognize significant diversity in the structure of subsistence and goods production in the service of domestic groups and institutional entities throughout the region. Here, domestic and institutional economies, specialization, distribution, economic development, and future directions are reviewed. The Element closes with thoughts on the processes of socio-economic change on the scales of houses, villages, and regional strategies.
A fundamental debate in evolutionary theory concerns the scale of evolutionary process. For cultural evolution, it is well understood that cultural elements on the scales of basic units of information (i.e. how to manufacture a lithic tool) change over time. We also recognize change in more complexly integrated cultural traditions spanning composite technologies to the fundamentals of social and political systems. The question remains as to whether change in the latter entities is a byproduct of evolution on lower scales leading to blended higher level entities or if evolutionary process actually unfolds on higher integrated scales. This study poses a test of the opposing hypotheses that evolution acts on the highest (species-like) scale versus the lowest (ephemeral traits) scales using data from the Middle to late Holocene Siberian and American Arctic. Results of modelling using Bayesian phylogenetic and Neighbornet Network procedures suggest that two distinct Arctic cultures, termed Paleo-Inuit and Neo-Inuit, evolved as species-like entities. Once established each evolved further on lower scales leading to blended within-group outcomes. We argue that cultural evolution is best understood as a process that can simultaneously act on multiple scales.
In recent decades, phylogenetic methods originated in evolutionary biology have been put forward as fruitful strategies to trace and reconstruct the origin, development, distribution, and interrelatedness of archaeological artifacts and traditions. Artifact phylogenies are increasingly being used by archaeologists to infer, develop, and test hypotheses about the processes that originate and shape material culture sets, as well as to study the extent and rates of cultural innovation, borrowing, diffusion, convergence, and loss. As an analytical tool, cultural phylogenetics can also be used to test hypotheses about the emergence, change, and exchange of artifact types, thereby allowing researchers to make inferences about temporal and regional behavioral patterns. This chapter will review some basic concepts of evolutionary phylogenetics, discuss its applications in archaeology, and reflect on some of the main challenges and prospects faced by the field.
We investigate how evolution proceeds across multiple scales considering culture as species, hierarchically integrated systems, assemblages of many coherent units, and collections of ephemeral entities in order to examine the nature of Early Thule cultural evolution with reference to material culture and adaptive strategies. Results suggest that harpoon heads evolved via cultural transmission processes with little impact from terrestrial ecological context. In contrast, characteristics of architectural features, stone tool assemblages, and combined architecture and stone tools displayed evidence for significant effects of both cultural transmission and select measures of ecological context. There is no evidence that evolution was ‘evoked’ by ecological context alone.
This review highlights archaeological investigations of precontact and historic house sites in Polynesia, a region noted for its diversity of chiefdoms in terms of scale and elaboration. Anthropological and historical perceptions of the Polynesian household have shifted over time, influencing the ways in which the household has been defined in archaeology. Early research emphasized houses as a unit of study within settlement pattern archaeology and as a means of delineating formal variability between sites and communities. Current studies stress a more holistic view of the household as a nexus of economic, social, and ritual activities. Diverse theoretical perspectives, such as the analytical concept of house societies, feminist archaeologies, landscape approaches, and agent-based models, have led to new archaeological approaches engaged with both the material and the nonmaterial aspects of the house and, in particular, how social relations structure the household. Current prominent themes include functional identification of house sites, understanding social variability, articulation of the household with the community, and comparative analyses of social complexity.
Humans first left Siberia and colonized the Americas perhaps around 16,000 years ago, and the Clovis archaeological complex in North America has traditionally been linked to this migratory pulse. Archaeologists searching for evidence of Clovis technological antecedents have focused
their attention on the Beringian and Siberian archaeological records. Growing evidence for the pre-Clovis occupation of North America provides a possible alternative source for the origins of Clovis. In this paper, we present new data on the pre-Clovis lithic assemblage from the Debra L. Friedkin
site, Texas, and compare Clovis and pre-Clovis lithic technological signatures. We show that while Clovis and pre-Clovis share some important technological traits, they also differ in important ways. We conclude that the pre-Clovis assemblage from Debra L. Friedkin cannot be called “Clovis,”
but it could represent a technological antecedent of Clovis.
Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the 'historic-geographic' school, it is possible to classify similar tales into "international types" and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs. Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recently applied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in the literature: ATU 333, 'Little Red Riding Hood'. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oral traditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia. However, in many of these cases, it is difficult to differentiate ATU 333 from another widespread international folktale, ATU 123, 'The Wolf and the Kids'. To shed more light on these relationships, data on 58 folktales were analysed using cladistic, Bayesian and phylogenetic network-based methods. The results demonstrate that, contrary to the claims made by critics of the historic-geographic approach, it is possible to identify ATU 333 and ATU 123 as distinct international types. They further suggest that most of the African tales can be classified as variants of ATU 123, while the East Asian tales probably evolved by blending together elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. These findings demonstrate that phylogenetic methods provide a powerful set of tools for testing hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales, and point towards exciting new directions for research into the transmission and evolution of oral narratives.
Models in demographic ecology predict that populations in agrarian villages experience cycles of growth and decline as tied to relationships between founding population sizes, birth and mortality rates, habitat constraints, landscape productivity, and socio-economic practices. Such predictions should be equally applicable to fisher-hunter-gatherers. Intensive research at the Bridger River site on the Canadian Plateau has provided significant new insight into the dynamics of population growth and decline, subsistence productivity, cooperation, and development of social inequalities in material goods. In this paper, we present new evidence drawing from the fine-grained stratigraphic record of Housepit 54 to assess details regarding change in subsistence and technology as related to population and social dynamics. Results indicate a long and complex history characterized by two complete demographic cycles. Critically, the two subsistence downturns were managed using different tactics. Reduced local resources during the first period was likely managed with shorter stays in winter residences, somewhat more extensive use of the landscape, and continuation of egalitarian social relations. The second economic downturn followed a short-lived boom in resources and population growth that created extremely competitive social conditions. The subsequent downturn was managed by entrenched winter sedentism and likely social control of access to critical resources.
Household archaeology focuses on what households do. Building and repairing houses is a household task that receives less explicit attention than do other tasks. Through the lens of political economy, we examine how three southern Northwest Coast households organized and orchestrated a complex labor task: building and maintaining their houses, by developing estimates of labor and raw material costs. We then use this analysis to show how house building and maintenance bears on issues of collective action, monumentality, anthropogenic landscapes, the development of concepts of property on the Northwest Coast, and of household continuity across episodes of cultural change. The political economies of Northwest Coast households have been central to theory building about the evolution and nature of sociocultural complexity among complex hunter-gatherer-fisher societies, but archaeological attention has emphasized subsistence. Our analysis does not supplant such models, but rather compliments them.
Lithic Technology and Risk A Winter Household at the Bridge River Village Site during the Fur Trade Period Kelly French The study of lithic artifacts can offer a great deal of insight into past lifeways, exposing variability in subsistence patterns, technological strategies, and socioeconomic organization (see also chapter 4, this volume). In this chapter I offer an analysis of the role played by lithic technology in the adaptive strategies of winter pithouse occupation at Bridge River village site during the Fur Trade period, and also explore the effects of the fur trade on technological behavior. More specifically, I examine how the people of Bridge River village site solved the problem of limited access to lithic raw material during winter occupations, when the pithouses were most intensively occupied. Scholars have suggested that stockpiling played an important role in maintaining enough raw materials to last through the winter (Hayden et al. 1996; Prentiss 2000). However, I argue that stockpiling may not have provided an everabundant source, and that risk of loss may have been significant during winter occupations. With this expectation, I hope to identify and ana lyze what strategies were applied to mitigate the risk of exhausting limited raw materials over the winter using a theory of risk framework. Every cultural system creates technology to offset risk and the possibility of loss. If technology helps to minimize risk, highcost situations should involve solutions that minimize the probability of technological failure. Every act related to lithic artifacts, be it use or maintenance, results in the loss of material. Without access to raw material during the winter, the Bridge River people would have had to apply other strategies to cope with a decreasing supply. I argue that winter occupants of Housepit 54 had limited access to sources of lithic raw material, resulting in the application of conservation tactics such as bipolar reduction, intense retouch, and reuse of broken tools. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand the means by which the people of Bridge River achieved success and prosperity with the help of stone, and how raw material availability determined technological strategies during the Fur Trade period. The Theory of Risk Darwinian evolutionary research in archaeology has focused on the ways in which artifacts or behaviors can increase fitness in a certain context, and what the effects of changes are on those conditions (Bamforth and Bleed 1997). For this research I examine coping strategies that were applied in the manufacture of stone tools to help minimize risk. In order to understand risk, it is important to define it. In everyday usage risk often refers to perilous or unpredictable situations; however, once the idea was coopted into anthropology and archaeology, the concept of risk was applied to fit different perspectives and interests (Bamforth and Bleed 1997). At times the concept of risk would be used synonymously with predictability or reliability (Bamforth and Bleed 1997), Lithic Technology and Risk 91 but risk has been widely defined as the probability of failure or loss (Keene 1981). Huntergatherer scholars typically approach risk from a human behavioral ecological (HBE) perspective, which focuses on the possible failure of the individual (Ames 2006). HBE can be used to address a vast array of archaeological problems. When relating it to intensification, one will often look at diet breadth and prey choice within optimal foraging theory (OFT). The diet breadth model predicts that the highestranked prey typically will be chosen over less profitable prey unless there are cultural prohibitions against its use that challenge optimal foraging predictions (Bird and O’Connell 2006; Broughton 1994; Broughton et al. 2010; Janetski 1997; Winterhalder and Smith 2000). If the highranked resource declines or becomes less accessible, lowerranked items will be included in the diet, so inclusion of lowerranked resources is reliant not on their own abundance, but instead on the lack of highranked prey (Byers and Broughton 2004; Broughton 1994; Janetski 1997; Munro 2009). The assumption here is that foragers have a goal behind their actions, which is to choose the best option with the most net yield in a given environment. This model can also be applied to field processing, such as whether or not resources (raw material, harvested game or foodstuffs) will be processed in the field for more efficient transport (Metcalfe and Barlow 1992; Winter halder and Smith 2000).
Cultural Change and Continuity across the Late PreColonial and Early Colonial Periods in the Bridge River Valley: Archaeology of the S7istken Site Lisa Michelle Smith The winter housepit villages of the Middle Fraser region of British Columbia were among the largest aggregated settlements in North America’s Pacific Northwest. Many of these sites were occupied intermittently for over two millennia, and despite decades of research and countless publi cations describing aboriginal lifeways during the more ancient past, little is known about the socioeconomic structures that persisted during the late preColonial and Colonial periods. Ongoing research is beginning to shed light on cultural patterns that occurred during the Fur Trade period of the early to mid-nineteenth century (Carlson 2006). Interesting findings have emerged from these investigations, including evidence for continuation of aboriginal technologies despite long-lasting direct and indirect influence of Europeans, EuroCanadians, and EuroAmericans through the market economy. As much as they have contributed to our understanding of MidFraser history, in these studies Colonial period occupations are investigated in isolation from those that took place immediately beforehand. Thus, there is no sense of how preexisting conditions may have contributed to the ways in which the colonial experience played out. Lightfoot (1995) argues that archaeologists need to remove the artificial divide of prehistory and history in order to view European and Native American contact as part of a larger historical continuum. Unfortunately, little is known about the late preColonial period in the MidFraser region, making it difficult to generate this type of expansive cultural narrative. In this study I begin to fill some of the gaps in the Mid-Fraser interpretive narrative by evalu ating cultural change and continuity across the late preColonial and Colonial periods. Research of the late preColonial period focuses on Housepit 1 of the S7istken site, a winter pithouse village located in Bridge River Canyon just beyond the presentday town of Lillooet, British Columbia. From there the study expands into the Fur Trade period and incorporates data from Housepit 54 of the Bridge River site (Smith 2014). Ultimately, findings from Housepit 1 serve as baseline data from which to measure changes that occurred in Housepit 54 during the Fur Trade period. Assuming that Housepits 1 and 54 are normative representations of households during their respective time periods (which they may not be), findings may serve as a proxy for evolving cultural patterns during the late preColonial and Colonial periods in the Mid-Fraser beyond the two study sites. With that in mind, I make the argument that traditional subsistence, organized around collectorbased strategies, remained relatively unchanged across the two periods (see also Carlson 2006). Further, I argue that the exchange economy persisted through time, though it became amplified during the Fur Trade period, causing household production to become more structured around manufacture of trade goods (Fisher 1992). Resource control 227 Cultural Change and Continuity in the Bridge River Valley was consolidated as a consequence, and hunting became less localized after surrounding ungulate populations were overhunted due to buckskin production. Finally, I argue that the fur trade resulted in easier access to prestige items used for social signaling, marking changes in values in terms of material goods. Emergence of Aggregated Winter Settlements in the Middle Fraser Region of the Northern Plateau The MidFraser region of British Columbia is a dramatic landscape marked by alpine tundra environments distributed across high mountain peaks, ponderosa pine forests and bunchgrass environments at midelevations, and deeply incised river canyons below (Alexander 1992). Ice sheets covering the North American continent receded at the end of the Pleistocene more than 10,000 years ago, forming this landscape. Terraces were carved along steep canyon walls, eventually becoming surrounded by bountiful river and forest environments. By approximately 3500 cal. BP, the hunting and gathering ancestors of the St’át’imc people had established their first winter pithouses in the area. Shortly thereafter they developed a delayed subsistence economy based on anadromous salmon and geophytes. Over the next few millennia the villages continued to grow in population and size, and throughout that time it appears that households were relatively egalitarian, with similar access to important raw materials and food resources (Prentiss et al. 2012). This trend continued even after 2400 cal. BP as communities began to participate in regional trade networks that moved food and material items throughout the Pacific Northwest (Hayden and Schulting 1997; Morin 2012).
Lithic Technology during the Fur Trade Period at Housepit 54 Anna Marie Prentiss, Kelly French, Sara Hocking, Matthew Mattes, Matthew J. Walsh, Mary Bobbitt, and Kristen D. Barnett While the study of lithic technology has been very prominent in Middle Fraser Canyon archaeology (Hayden et al. 1996, 2000; Prentiss 2000; Prentiss and Clarke 2008; Prentiss et al. 2015; Rousseau 1992), little explicit research has focused on stone tool production and use from the Colonial period despite wide recognition that stone tools were made and used at least into the early Gold Rush period of 1858 (Alexander 2000; Hayden et al. 1996; Teit 1900, 1906). Ethnographer James Teit (1900, 1906) provides remarkably detailed descriptions of many tool forms from this period. Excavation of the Fur Trade period floor and roof of Housepit 54 has for the first time provided extensive archaeological data on stone tool technology from the earlyto mid-nineteenth century. It is even conceivable that Teit’s (1900, 1906) St’át’imc informants had lived there— or at least knew of its occupants. Access to such an excellent assemblage of materials provides the ideal opportunity not only to document traditional stone technology during this critical time period, but also to draw from the lithic technology data to further our under standing of household economic decision making, ritual behavior, and the effects of the fur trade economy on an indigenous household. We begin with a brief review of the literature on lithic technology in Colonial contexts. We then examine recent research into Mid- Fraser lithic technology with a particular focus on models of lithic technological organization developed by Brian Hayden and colleagues. Next we provide a descriptive and interpretive overview of the lithic artifacts from the Fur Trade period occupation at Housepit 54. Finally, we consider a range of implications regarding persistence of ancient traditions and the effects of the fur trade. Archaeology of Stone Tool Production in the Colonial Period of North America It is well known that traditional lithic technology persisted well into the Colonial period in many parts of the Americas. In the Southeast, Mississippian groups had long favored a combination of core and flake and biface reduction strategies in sedentary farming villages (Parry and Kelly 1987). These technologies continued during colonial times as groups negotiated relationships with newcomers (Cobb and Ruggiero 2003), but they were also modified to fit local demands— for example, those associated with participation in new exchange networks calling for furs and other animal products (Johnson 1997, 2003). Plains village societies found themselves in the center of both more ancient networks as well as European- associated networks centered on bison products and the movement of goods from both the Atlantic and Pacific contexts (Hudson 1993; Mitchell 2013; Odell 2003; O’Shea and Ludwickson 1992; Rogers 1990). Organization of tool production in these contexts was impacted by raw material constraints and activity demands 68 ANNA MARIE PRENTISS ET AL. (Holen 1991), specialized production demands (Mitchell 2013), and in some villages, household status (Mitchell 2013). California groups continued chipped stone tool production in response to demand for trade goods (Gamble 2008) and as resistance to Spanish and Russian incursions (Lightfoot 2005; Lightfoot et al. 1993, 1998; Silli man 2003). Pacific Northwest Coast groups adopted European technologies selectively while maintaining many traditional stone tools (Prince 2003). People of the Pacific Northwest Plateau were also highly selective regarding the use of European goods, thus maintaining many ancient technologies despite an expanding Euro- Canadian fur trade (Carlson 2000, 2006). By the time of European incursions into the western Arctic, Eskimo/Inuit groups had largely adopted ground slate technology over chipped stone (Ford 1959; Frink 2005). However, there was apparently significant variation involving elements of chipped stone technology, as demonstrated by Cassell (2003, 2005) and Friesen (2013) in camps associated with European and American whalers. The question of technological transitions in colonial contexts has long been of interest to anthropologists (Spicer 1964) and somewhat more recently to archaeologists (Kaplan 1985). The study of technological changes in this context has transitioned from the topic of “acculturation” (Cusick 1998) to investigation of resistance (Lightfoot 2005) and persistence (Panich 2013). Simultaneously, archaeologists have become aware that their interpretations of the Colonial period archaeological record have direct impacts on descendant communities (Lightfoot et al. 2013). Several hypotheses have been offered concerning decisions by indigenous groups regarding organization of stone tool production and use in reference to entanglements with colonial powers. While there has been a sharp rebuttal against simple concepts.
Spatial Analysis of the Fur Trade Period Floor and Roof at Housepit 54 Alexandra WilliamsLarson, Kristen D. Barnett, PeiLin Yu, Matthew Schmader, and Anna Marie Prentiss Households offer significant analytic potential for archaeologists. They have an emergent character that makes them more than the sum of their parts; they are the primary arena for the expression of gender roles, kinship, and sociali zation, where culture is mediated and transformed into behavior. Because greater emphasis has centered on understanding villagewide evolutionary trends at Bridge River (Prentiss et al. 2008; Prentiss, Foor et al. 2012), no complete houses had been excavated at the site prior to initiation of the Housepit 54 project. The excavation of Housepit 54 during the 2012 field season enabled a closer examination of household organization. Households, however, are ethnographic phenomena, not archaeological ones. While households live in and use material culture, Wilk and Rathje (1982) remind us that archaeologists excavate structures and artifacts, not socioeconomic units; however, as Horne (1982: 677) states, “If the domestic dwelling is the physical and spatial expression of those who live and work therein, then archaeologists are in a good position to argue from the remains of house structures to aspects of the household.” This research examines how communalistic or collectivist household strategies and intrahousehold ranking are manifested in the spatial organization of Housepit 54. To approach these relationships, we provide archaeological and ethnographic frames of reference for interpreting patterns observed within Housepit 54. Defining the Household Defining the term household has proven to be challenging for archaeologists. It is a polysemic word that draws on folk and analytic vocabularies alike, and because it can mean so many things to different people, it has often defied definition and thus further research (Netting et al. 1984; Wilk and Netting 1984; Yanagisako 1979). Initial definitions of households emphasized their morphology in kinship terms (Foster and Parker 2012; Gahr et al. 2006; Gillespie 2000a). However, these attempts were too bound in marriage systems and residence rules to aid analysts in understanding behavior. Later conceptions continued to highlight household composition, though they began to look beyond strict kinship ties to examine how nuclear families, extended family members, individuals, and servants participated in simple or complex households (Blanton 1994). Other definitions emphasized a set of individuals sharing a living space, while also acknowledging that domestic groups do not always reside in a single dwelling (Coupland 1985; Kramer 1982). Wilk and Rathje (1982) conceptualize the household as consisting of three elements: (1) the social: the demographic unit, including the number and relationships of the members; (2) the material: the dwelling, activity areas, and possessions; and (3) the behavioral, the activities performed by household members. This morphological definition provides the most opportunities for analyzing and understanding households. Spatial Analysis of the Fur Trade Period Floor and Roof at Housepit 54 183 Functional definitions allow a greater focus on how households behave. Households are united through four essential activities: (1) production: the organization of labor; (2) distribution: the movement of resources from producers to consumers (such as pooling or sharing); (3) transmission: the movement of rights, roles, land, and property between generations; and (4) reproduction: the rearing and socializing of children (Wilk and Netting 1984; Wilk and Rathje 1982). While all of these behaviors occur within a household, different theoretical approaches may underscore one or more actions. Conversely, disparate theories can find common ground in their shared emphasis on these behaviors. To examine the role of coordination and cooperation within hierarchical societies, this study highlights the roles of household production and distribution as described under the concepts of “the household” and “the House.” Evolutionary and ecological research sees the household as the fundamental socioeconomic institution. Like an organism, the household is very flexible and sensitive, responding even to minor, shortterm fluctuations in the socioeconomic environment (Bawden 1982; Netting et al. 1984). Access to resources, seen in the actions of production and distribution, is associated with the size of the household and the structure (Ames 2006; Netting 1982). Differences in socioeconomic status may influence household size and the demographic performance of members (Netting 1982). In ranked traditional societies such as those documented ethnographically in the Northwest Coast (e.g., Ames 2006), less materially affluent households likely had fewer births and a higher rate of infant mortality while also being at risk of losing their dependents— and, in some contexts, their servants and/or employees— to wealthier households.
The evolution of material wealth-based inequality is an important topic in archaeological research. While a number of explanatory models have been proposed, rarely have they been adequately tested. A significant challenge to testing such models concerns our ability to define distinct, temporally short-term, residential occupations in the archaeological record. Sites often lack evidence for temporally persistent inequality, or, when present, the palimpsest nature of the deposits often make it difficult to define the processes of change on scales that are fine enough to evaluate nuanced model predictions. In this article, we use the detailed record of Housepit 54 from the Bridge River site, interior British Columbia, to evaluate several alternative hypotheses regarding the evolution of persistent material wealth-based inequality. Results of our analyses indicate that inequality appeared abruptly coincident with a decline in intra-house cooperation associated with population packing and the initiation of periodic subsistence stress. We conclude that persistent inequality in this context was a byproduct of altered social networks linked to a Malthusian transition and ceiling.
Considerable debate exists concerning drivers of social change in human societies. One perspective asserts that demographic and economic conditions play a critical role in conditioning human organizational decision-making. Another argument suggests that human agency conditioned by innovative thinking outside of demographic and economic pressures is the more fundamental source of change. The Bridge River site, British Columbia is an optimal locality to explore variable effects of subsistence economy and demography on social change. Previous research indicates that Malthusian processes played important roles in demographic, socio-economic, and political change. This paper presents a test of the Malthusian model drawing data on storage capacity and population size from a single long-lived house within the Bridge River village. Results suggest that household occupants likely experienced two Malthusian periods, persisting through the first but abandoning the house and village during the second. An important implication is that economic and demographic conditions have critical impacts on social process but that specific episodes of collective action also remain dependent upon human agency.
There has been significant debate in paleoanthropology and more recently, archaeology, over the concept of mosaic evolution. Essentially, proponents of the concept argue that different aspects of organisms evolve separately while others argue that organisms evolve as integrated entities. Similarly, archaeologists debate the relevance of cultural evolution as a complex multi-scalar process. In this paper we conduct two cladistic analyses of cultural phenomena focusing on skateboard decks and projectile points from an archaeological site to examine variability in the evolutionary process. We find evidence for mosaic evolution in both studies and conclude that modularity likely is an important factor in cultural evolution, at least at the level of artifact design. We caution future investigators of evolution in ancient stone tools that modularity could have complicating effects on phylogenetic outcomes unless explicitly considered.
The tension between hierarchy and communalism is a prominent feature of social life in transegalitarian societies. How are hierarchy and communalism combined in these societies? How are they materialized in everyday life? In this paper, we examine the relationship between hierarchy and communalism in the transegalitarian societies of the Northwest Coast of North America. We focus on households, the primary socioeconomic units of the culture area, and on the plank houses that contained them. Despite the apparent contradiction between hierarchy and communalism, we find that in Northwest Coast households with highly developed social hierarchies, communal practices remained deeply entrenched, while in households with weaker hierarchies, communalism was less developed. The relative importance of hierarchy and communalism in daily household life was clearly materialized in the spatial order of plank houses. By simultaneously objectifying both principles, the house may have played an important role in easing the tension between them.
A common issue for archaeologists who study intermediate-scale societies is defining scale and complexity of occupations across entire villages or towns. This can be a major problem since an understanding of site-wide inter-household occupation patterns can be crucial for accurate reconstruction of village demographics and socio-economic organization. In this paper we present new research at the Bridge River site, a large complex hunter-gatherer village in British Columbia, designed to develop a site-wide history of household occupation patterns. We accomplish this through broad-scale geophysical investigations, test excavations and an extensive program of radiocarbon dating. Results of the study suggest that the village grew rapidly between ca. 1800 and 1250 cal. B.P. expanding from 7 to at least 29 simultaneously occupied houses. Variability in household spacing and size indicate that social organization may have grown increasingly complex parallel with rising numbers of households.
Sedentism has long been regarded as one of the key elements of the Neolithic. The built environment—especially houses—and their societal connotations, most characteristically typified in Hodder’s (1990) concept of the ‘domus’, serve as its main antecedents. In the western part of the north European plain, the arrival of the LBK around 5300 cal bc does confirm this seemingly fixed pairing. Further north and west, in the wetlands and wet margins of the Lower Rhine Area (LRA), the situation is markedly different. Over approximately two millennia domesticates and cultigens become an increasingly regular component of the local economy and diet, yet houses do not follow suit. The little evidence available suggests the existence of rather diverse and relatively small structures, frequent phases of rebuilding and a continuation of mobility. This seemingly ‘unstructured’ vernacular character of house building points to long-term memory, practices of ‘citation’ and the creation of persistent places. It provides an interesting perspective on the meaning of home and its place in the Neolithic of this area and the way it interacts with the wetland landscape and environment.
A wide range of factors has recently been proposed to explain lithic assemblage organization and tool morphology. These factors include: reliability, maintainability, risk, mobility, versatility, and flexibility. Discussion of all these factors has tended to remain on an abstract level with anecdotal analyses or non-lithic ethnographic observations used for support. The present chapter analyzes a complete assemblage from the Interior Plateau of British Coumbia with the aim of trying to explain assemblage organization and tool morphology. Design theory provides a powerful analytical framework for dealing with these problems. Results demonstrate that basic considerations such as requirements of task performance, raw material availability, and processing volumes play the most important roles in determining assemblage organization and morphology. In trying to apply more recently proposed factors to the explanation of tool morphology, we found many of them to be highly ambiguous and perhaps non-operational. In addition, theoretically expected outcomes of these models sometimes did not match archaeological lithic patterns. In other cases, their usefulness seems akin to considerations of “prestige display” in lithics, i.e., most useful as special case factors and most relevant in carefully defined situations (e.g., hunting gear). Nevertheless, all these concepts can be accommodated in a broad design analysis framework, emphasizing constraints, design considerations, and reduction/resharpening strategies.
A new method called the neighbor-joining method is proposed for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from evolutionary distance data. The principle of this method is to find pairs of operational taxonomic units (OTUs [= neighbors]) that minimize the total branch length at each stage of clustering of OTUs starting with a starlike tree. The branch lengths as well as the topology of a parsimonious tree can quickly be obtained by using this method. Using computer simulation, we studied the efficiency of this method in obtaining the correct unrooted tree in comparison with that of five other tree-making methods: the unweighted pair group method of analysis, Farris's method, Sattath and Tversky's method, Li's method, and Tateno et al.'s modified Farris method. The new, neighbor-joining method and Sattath and Tversky's method are shown to be generally better than the other methods.
This study tests alternative hypotheses regarding the underlying conditions favoring variation in degree of differentiation between cultures in an evolving lineage. To accomplish this we develop a phylogenetic analysis of the early Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt) of eastern Siberia and northern North America. The use of early ASTt data permits us to monitor change while largely eliminating the possibility of influence by other cultural traditions. It also allows us to explore lingering questions regarding ASTt migrations. We examine correlations between tree branch length as a measure of cultural differentiation and geographic distance (from the oldest site), mean radiocarbon date, and three measures of terrestrial ecological variation. Outcomes suggest that only geographic distance and radiocarbon dates correlate with tree branch length. We offer conclusions regarding ASTt evolution and migrations along with ideas for future research.
A fundamental problem fur anthropological archaeidogy lies in defining anil explaining the evolutionary origins of social inequality. Researchers have offered a range of models emphasizing variability in the roles of managers, aggrandiz.ers. ecological variability, and historical contexts. Recent studies suggest that the form of emergent inequality may have varied significantly between groups, implying that pathways In inequality may have varied as well. Unfortunately it has been difficult to test many of these models using archaeological data given their requirements for fine-grained assessments of spu-tiolemporal variability in many data classes. Retail research at the Bridge River site in British Columbia provides the opportunity to explore the utility of a range of explanatory miniéis associated with early .social iiieijtiality. Results of the study suggest thai inequality, measured as significant variability in accumulation of a range of material wealth items, came late to the Bridge River site (ca. 1200-1300 cal. B.P.) and was associated witli a per i oil oj demographic packing and appar-em declining access to some critical subsistence resources. Assessment ofinterhousehold variability in demography, wealth accumulation, and occupational longevity suggests thai markers of significant affluence manifested only in newly established houses. An important inijilication is that material wealth-based inetptality may not liave been hereditary in nature at Bridge River during the period prior to 1100 cal. B.P.
Une étude des Indiens de la partie nord-ouest de l'Amérique septentrionale semble indiquer que le système de parenté (descent group) en vigueur était ambilinéaire. Bien que les données ethnographiques soient plutôt maigres pour certains groupes, pour d'autres, tels les "Lower Carriers", les détails sont abondants et indiquent clairement la présence d'un système de descendance du type ambilinéaire, conditionné par le besoin de contrôler l'exploitation du saumon.
This paper provides an analysis of radiocarbon dates acquired during earlier and recent field seasons at the Keatley Creek site, southern British Columbia. Results indicate that early occupations predating 1900 cal. BY occurred, but were not likely associated with population aggregation and large housepits. The aggregated village appears to have emerged by approximately 1700 cal. B.P and was abandoned at approximately 800 cal. B.P A break in the occupational sequence is recognized at 1450-1350 cal. B.P and one other short break may have occurred shortly after 1250 cal. B.P Peak socioeconomic complexity appears to have been achieved between 1350 and 800 cal BY Climatic warming may have provided a selective environment favoring population aggregation and intensification during this time. The final abandonment of the Keatley Creek village appears to have been part of a regional phenomenon suggesting the possibility that climatic factors it ere important in this case as well.
The inheritance of social standing from one generation to the next did not occur for most of the time that humans have lived, but became common only once human societies grew beyond a certain size. This paper offers a theory of how social inheritance may have resulted from this change in size, simply through the accompanying decrease in social network density. This decrease brought about differentiation in social network positions, creating structural advantages and disadvantages in group decision processes. As these processes determined social worth and leadership in societies, social network position became integral to social status and political prestige. And because network position tends to be passed from parent to child, social status came to be passed on, not (at first) through the inheritance of power or property, but through the inheritance of social connections. To illustrate the relationship between structural advantage and network density, we use a mathematical model of social influence in an array of small networks, as well as larger random networks to show how network position becomes increasingly determinant of social status as density decreases and network positions become increasingly differentiated. We use these results to further predict the conditions under which “who you know” matters more than “what you know.”
The first Neolithic architectures in the Paris Basin were the Danubian-style longhouses of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) cultures. These enormous structures were first built about 5100 cal bc in this region and would have dwarfed Mesolithic structures in both size and durability. This chapter focuses on the lifecycle of the longhouse structure, examining in turn what it meant to build, live with and then abandon this type of architecture. Adding a temporal dimension to the study of domestic buildings enlivens static house plans and assists in the investigation of how the house operated as a locus for social memory. The cyclical routines of the agricultural year are considered here alongside the more linear trajectories of community formation and dissolution, in which the longhouse was implicated. The two longhouse cultures found in the Paris Basin, the Rubané Récent du Bassin parisien (RRBP) and the Villeneuve-Saint-Germain (VSG), are compared in order to investigate issues of cultural transformation. It is concluded that building a longhouse was a commitment to the local community on the scale of the human life-time at least, while older houses left to decay in situ became a focus for recalling and connecting with the past.
The nature of indigenous band societies is examined through an analysis of the historical dynamics of sociopolitical organization among the Secwepemc of the northern Plateau. Secwepemc history is characterized by recurrent tensions between the autonomy of extended family groups and the solidarity of the band collective. Unlike earlier static, and trait-based models of Plateau culture, this processual and historically grounded model of sociopolitical organization can account for cultural diversity among Plateau groups, can recognize patterned processes of cultural continuity and change through history, and may be applicable to other North American indigenous band societies. By implication, viable and sustainable forms of Aboriginal self-government in Canada must incorporate innovative structures allowing expression of these enduring commitments to different levels of social belonging.