Terraforming, Monumentality and Long Term Practice in the Coast Salish World

Summary

The archaeological record of the southern Gulf Islands of coastal British Columbia provides evidence of deliberate and long-term construction of coastal landforms over the last 4500 years. Local landscapes were altered, modified and managed in the service of production, but the implications of such practices for the construction of place, of inequality, and of political networks are profound. I document the magnitude and extent of landscape construction spatially, focusing on quantifying investments in coastal spit sites from the southern Gulf Islands. I also address the temporal scale of this landscape construction process, which, while fundamentally long term, also appears to have been punctuated by shorter term moment of contestation and reorganization. My overarching objective is to better establish how material production, social inequalities, and political autonomy played out over deep time, and refine notions of how ownership systems can emerge from the construction of built places.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Terraforming and Monumentality in Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage