Precontact Coast Salish Seasonality in Social Networks: A Modeling Approach

Summary

A crucial aspect for examining the production and reproduction of material culture among complex foraging societies such as those of the Pacific Northwest Coast is understanding the relationships between social networks and assemblage diversity. This model examines one small aspect of this issue, seasonal variation in social network size. The model is ethnographically informed by Coast Salish ethnographic household sizes. Assemblage richness and evenness in discrete artifact styles are examined under random social learning, varying seasonal social network size and innovation rate. Larger seasonal aggregations appear to result in a higher frequency of rare types, but this effect is not significant enough to strongly pattern the record of interest. Changes in innovation rate appear to also overwhelm any signals in this aspatial model from differing social network sizes through seasons.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21744