The Effect of Boats and Watercraft on Archaeological Interpretations of Social/Economic Organization and Population Histories within the Pacific Northwest of North America

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.

The use or increased use of boats fundamentally alters people’s relationship to their landscape. However, how boats alter this relationship is not always straightforward or consistent. For example, increased use or improvements in boating technologies has been variously argued to extend, contract, and/or lead to an intensification of resources within a group’s territorial radius. Using archaeological and ethnographic examples from the Pacific Northwest of North America, it is suggested here that regardless of whether boats lead to an increase or contraction in the aerial extent of a group’s territory, they likely lead to more focal settlement patterns, with emphasis on fewer locations, leading to more discretely clustered sizes and types of sites. The implications of this on how archaeologists interpret proxies for population and social and economic organization are discussed.

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)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36697.0