Founding House, Neighborhood, Village: Hunter-Gatherer Social Complexity at the Slocan Narrows Site, Upper Columbia River Area, Interior Pacific Northwest, North America

Summary

The Slocan Narrows site is a prehistoric pithouse village aggregation on the Slocan River, a tributary of the Upper Columbia River in the interior Pacific Northwest, North America. 14C dating of housepit deposits have revealed a complex occupational history, likely reflecting fluctuating demographic and habitation cycles beginning ca. 3100 cal BP continuing to approximately contact in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Slocan Narrows was occupied through three millennia characterized by the establishment of a single founding pithouse with expansion into neighborhoods four times with only one substantial occupational building hiatus occurring from 2400-2000 cal BP. We interpret the occupational history to be indicative of founding houses, recruitment and/or reproduction for expansion, and competition between corporate groups at different scales. Following similar research methodology conducted at other villages in the interior Pacific Northwest, household and village occupational histories contribute to our understanding of the evolution of hunter-gatherer social complexity. This paper explores the link between detecting emerging social complexity at Slocan Narrows with current theoretical notions as how archaeologists have defined the term as well as how Indigenous Peoples view complexity when refereeing to ancestral populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Households and Social Evolution: Comprehensive Approaches to Social Transformation

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15301