Navigating Paradigms: Site Location and Settlement Patterns in Watery Environments from the Pacific Northwest Coast and Southern Patagonia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Reconstructing past seafaring presents major challenges. Beyond the archaeological invisibility of watercraft, a key issue is that theoretical models and archaeological predictions concerning aquatic movement are less developed than for terrestrial cases. We apply an explorative and comparative approach to analyzing different watery spaces along the Northwest Coast of North America and the Fuego-Patagonian archipelago of southern South America. Five study cases are mobilized, three on the Northwest Coast (Chinook, Coast Salish, Tsimshian) and two in Fuego-Patagonia (Kawésqar, Yámana). The dataset represents watery environments ranging from rugged to uniform coastlines, from inland to open sea areas, and is also diverse in social and technological respects. They represent different paradigms of hunter-fisher-gatherer social and organizational strategies, including different watercraft technology (e.g., dugout, bark canoe). GIS-based and learning machine methods are applied to the archaeological and ethnographic data to evaluate to what extent site location decisions, settlement patterns, and group interaction in each scenario were driven by environmental versus other factors. This initial study of the two regions and their respective internal variation offers the opportunity to consider how environment, seafaring, and social strategies interacted to produce local and regional histories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36235.0