Of Longhouses and Lineages: Evaluation of Transformations in Maritime Archaic Social Organization in the Far Northeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The social organization of Maritime Archaic groups of Newfoundland and Labrador is notoriously difficult to assess due to poor preservational environments, challenging logistics of working in the Subarctic, and a paucity of research directly applicable to such questions; however, a long chronological sequence of their residential architecture and mortuary patterns has been documented that suggests that it may have undergone significant transformations in the Middle Holocene. While several researchers have proposed various causal elements that contributed to these transformations, a focused evaluation of how descent and residence patterns contributed and/or were affected by these shifts across the Maritime Archaic range is lacking. Part of the reason for this is that their world was vast and seemingly stretched beyond the ability to maintain direct social connections; yet, despite large distances, the material culture suggests they maintained some form of social relatedness even as we see regional variations develop in their socio-economic strategies. In this paper we discuss data from Maritime Archaic houses and burials from different periods and evaluate the possibility that they represent significant transformations in their social organization, including their descent and post-marital residence patterns.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22937