Documenting Cultural Innovation, Adoption, and Stability among the Southern Athapaskans

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The migration of Athapaskan (alternatively, Athabaskan or Na-Dene) groups from the Subarctic regions of northwestern Canada and Alaska to the American Southwest is one of the longest and best documented movements of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The starkly different environment of the Southwest and the subsequent interactions with Southwest peoples that had been living in the region for millennia, have made this migration a focus for anthropologists interested in the effects of environment and interaction on cultural practices and language. In our study, we used a large dataset of cultural traits compiled by anthropologists to investigate cultural change. We compared the cultural traits of Southern Athapaskan peoples with those of Northern Athapaskans and unrelated Southwest peoples. Our analysis showed that social and kinship organization, subsistence economy, and technology had the highest number of cultural traits that differed from the Northern Athapaskans. However, the technology suite of cultural traits had the highest number of new cultural traits that could also be found in adjacent non-Athapaskan groups in the region. Cultural traits related to the spiritual quest had the highest rate of innovation. We discuss the implications of these results for the study of cultural evolution and the archaeological record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37634.0