In this latest treatise on the Bridge River site, located in the Fraser River Valley in the Interior Plateau region of British Columbia in western Canada, Anna Marie Prentiss and colleagues share their research designs, methods, and meticulous analyses of the long sequence of floors of Housepit 54. The book offers an easy-to-follow model of hypothesis testing and archaeological interpretation while also engaging with long-standing discourses on household archaeology and the development of institutionalized inequality.
Prentiss and coauthors seek to test ethnographic models of resource access and inherited inequality through the examination of one winter residential structure: they look specifically at household-level activities and labor divisions, occupation and abandonment decisions, and the presence or absence of material wealth-based goods and resources. These questions are rigorously tested using the same suite of analyses for materials and finds from each floor to provide a fine-grained chronological account of one particularly long-lived house of the 78 total houses known from the Bridge River site. Each chapter is devoted to the analysis and interpretation of one of its 15 floors, with specific attention to the processes of negotiating social relationships and resource access across interpersonal and familial lines.
I see this book as offering three main contributions to the field. First, it is a model example of both household archaeology and research design. In the first chapter, the authors draw on ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature about Indigenous groups of the Plateau and on the archaeological literature about architecture and activity areas at sites in the Interior Pacific Northwest to develop hypotheses and expectations. Although rereading these hypotheses and expectations in every chapter can be redundant, the clear and thoughtful analyses make it easy to compare and contrast the behavioral patterns of the Housepit 54 occupants through time; these analyses also offer a reminder of the importance of consistently revisiting our hypotheses, expectations, and biases. For anyone teaching or learning research design or planning to excavate residential architecture in the future, the attention to detail and format here is exemplary.
The authors clearly differentiate among these hypotheses, though I worry that the repetition and binary nature of their models and expectations have the potential to reify past human behavior. For example, in testing ethnographic models of social organization the authors contrast the “standard Plateau model” to the “Mid-Fraser model” (pp. 3, 191–195). I find their depiction of the Plateau model, however, to be an oversimplification of the vast diversity of cultural expressions and social institutions across the region. For example, James Teit (The Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus, 1930, pp. 158–159, 277) identifies social inequalities within several Plateau societies and kinship-based rules defining access to private resources. Also missing from both the model and interpretation are Xwísten (Bridge River Indian Band) myths or morals, residential patterns, or even reflections from community members. By looking to these accounts and primary sources from their longtime collaborators, the authors may be able to make connections to underlying traditional knowledge systems and add to existing ecological and economic explanations of sociopolitical change through time.
Second, the book offers a novel case study of Interior Plateau and Pacific Northwest architecture and social organization through time. I applaud the authors for their clear descriptions of the transitions between communal and collectivist social arrangements and the conditions surrounding the onset of material wealth-based inequality. Each chapter painstakingly documents changes in Housepit 54's shape, size, internal layout, and processes of occupation and abandonment that are reflective of overarching shifts in social strategies and relationships. To my knowledge, some of these spatial arrangements—such as the presence of linear hearths or reworking the house shape from oval to rectangular—have no parallel archaeologically or ethnographically in the Interior Plateau region. These findings offer practical comparisons for the area but will also be useful for anyone working from a household archaeological perspective globally.
Finally, this work offers nuanced views of the ways households and residential groups create and maintain long-lived connections to place, as well as the strategies by which households negotiate and reorganize sociopolitical relationships. Within the household associated with Housepit 54, significant changes in resource distribution and divisions of labor took place before inherited disparities in wealth became fully established. Material and inferred interpersonal inequalities among social networks were neither inevitable nor predetermined but instead were the result of historical events, processes, populations, and actors. These findings are particularly germane as anthropologists and archaeologists collectively work to understand the ways societies develop hierarchical, unequal social relationships and political systems—to understand the ways we become stuck and the options that exist to escape or prevent such arrangements.
