New Insights into Old (and New) Data: Lithic Technological Organization and Evolutionary Archaeology at the St. Mungo Site (DgRr-2), British Columbia, Canada

Summary

Results from excavations at the St. Mungo site by Len Ham and his team in the early 1980’s challenged previously held ideas about the Charles Culture (5000-3300 BP) in the Gulf of Georgia region. Previous research determined the Charles Culture was represented by egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. Several lines of evidence were cited to support this idea, including both the absence of ground slate knives for intensive fish processing and storage technology which would have allowed people to overwinter in larger groups leading to socio-economic complexity. Len Ham and team disagreed. Their work determined that stratified collector societies occupied the region during the Charles Culture, and they had data to support their theory. New data from several research projects over the past 10 years support Ham’s conclusions, including lithic data from recent excavations at St. Mungo. A technological analysis of the new lithic data from St. Mungo suggests people had developed and organized a sophisticated lithic tool kit for processing large amounts of riverine resources, such as salmon, long before ground slate tools came into wide use in the region. Using an evolutionary archaeology framework, I asses how this tool kit was developed, modified and persisted into the Marpole Phase.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14544