Shellscapes and Kinscapes: A Social Network Analysis of the Southern Northwest Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social network analyses in archaeology have been successfully used to examine the connections between diverse social actors in the past. These studies have largely focused on the relationships between humans and other humans, typically using cultural materials as proxies for people. The principles of relationality in Indigenous cultures, however, teach us that, in most cases, nonhuman actors are equal participants in the creation, structuring, and ongoing negotiation of social networks. This paper presents the results of a social network analysis in the traditional homelands of the Miluk and Hanis Coos-speaking peoples of the southern Northwest Coast. Drawing from local oral histories and contemporary discussions of the relationship between humans and their nonhuman kin, this analysis incorporates nonhuman persons as actors in the social network. Thus, rather than using cultural materials to characterize the social networks just between the human people at different sites, this study examines the social networks between humans and different animal species and their associated habitats. I will then further investigate patterning in these relationships to identify variations in how people at different sites related to their landscape and their nonhuman kin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36397.0