Houses, Territory, and Tenure: An Archaeological Case Study of Territoriality in the Salish Sea

Summary

The multi-family, above-ground, post-and-beam plankhouse looms large in our understanding of ancestral Coast Salish households that populated the coastal regions of southwestern British Columbia and northwestern Washington State. In addition to their practical role as shelters, plankhouses were both social fields of daily practice and ceremonialism, and imposing physical structures that communicated presence and the territorial and tenurial interests of the household. In this presentation, I examine the purported adoption of this house type over other architectural forms (e.g., in-ground houses) as the primary dwelling circa 2400-2000 years BP among the coastal populations of the Salish Sea. Drawing on Coast Salish structuring principles of bilateral kinship and group exogamy in conjunction with cultural values associated with autonomy and collectivism, I argue that an increasing territoriality in the region necessitated previously dispersed families aggregating into larger, mutually beneficial collectives that were best served by the modular design of the above-ground plankhouse.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Applying Indigenous Frameworks for Archaeological Analysis and Interpretation

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14595