Building Nearest Neighbor Models of Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems Using Four Case Studies for the Northwest Coast of North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Spatial analysis of settlement patterns have traditionally focused on hierarchical city states. Seldom do settlement pattern studies use spatial statistics to characterize hunter-gatherer settlement systems. Through the application of nearest neighbor analysis this paper characterizes the settlement patterns for four sub-regions of the Northwest Coast of North America. The four case studies come from published datasets for Prince Rupert Harbour, the Outer West Coast of Vancouver Island, the Fraser River Canyon, and the Northern Coast of Vancouver Island. With each of these case studies and much of the Northwest Coast in general resources and habitable areas are highly localized and circumscribed. By virtue of living around large bodies of water, access to land becomes a resource itself. Many nearest neighbor models assume a homogenous landscape. The spatial models presented in this paper attempt to account for this heterogeneity considering rivers and bodies of water spaces that cannot be inhabited. By controlling for these external variables, point pattern analyses have the potential to describe the settlement distribution of groups in the Northwest Coast and, by comparing these results to other culture groups and time periods, aid in disentangling the relationship between political structure and settlement organization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24501