Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T20:44:46.010Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hunter-gatherer complexity on the west coast of North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Hergert D. G. Maschner  and
Brian M. Fagan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The west coast of North America encompasses some of the richest and most diverse maritime environments on earth. Even in their presentday impoverished state, they support major commercial fisheries, large whale migrations and dense sea mammal populations. From the earliest days of European exploration, visitors such as the redoubtable Captain James Cook commented on the rich culture of Pacific coast peoples (Beaglehole 1967). ‘Their life may be said to comprise a constant meal,’ remarked Spanish friar Pedro Fages of the Chumash peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel in southern California. At European contact, between the 16th and 18th centuries AD, the shores of the Bering Strait, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the California coast supported elaborate, sophisticated and sedentary huntergatherer peoples. These decimated and muchchanged societies still enjoyed elaborate ceremonials and intricate social relations as late as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when pioneer anthropologists such as Franz Boas and John Harrington worked among them. From these researches have come classic stereotypes of west coast peoples as ‘complex huntergatherer societies’, some of which were organized in powerful chiefdoms. Peoples like the Tlingit, the Kwakiutl and the Chumash have become the epitome of complex huntergatherers in many archaeologists’ eyes.

Type
Special section
Information
Antiquity , Volume 65 , Issue 249 , December 1991 , pp. 921 - 923
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beaglehole, J.C. (ed.). 1967. The journals of Captain James Cook on his voyages of the Discovery vol. 3: The voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society.Google Scholar
Binford, L.R. 1983. In pursuit of the past. London: Thames & Hudson.Google Scholar
Bishop, C.A. 1987. Coast-interior exchange: the origins of stratification in northwestern North America, Arctic Anthropology 24(1): 72–83.Google Scholar
Cohen, M.N. 1981. Pacific Coast foragers: affluent or overcrowded? in Koyama, S. & Thomas, D.H. (ed.), Affluent foragers: Pacific Coasts east and west: 275–95. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Senri Ethnological Studies 9.Google Scholar
Coupland, G. 1988. Prehistoric economic and social change in the Tsimshian area, in Isaac, B.L. (ed.), Research in economic anthropology, Supplement 3: Prehistoric economies of the Pacific Northwest Coast: 211–44. Greenwich (CT): JAI Press.Google Scholar
Fladmark, K. 1975. A paleoecological model for Northwest Coast prehistory. Ottawa: National Museum of Man, Archaeological Survey of Canada. Mercury Series 43.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, D.A. 1974. Cultural diversity in early central California: a view from the North Coast Ranges, Journal of California Archaeology 1(1): 41–54.Google Scholar
Hildegarde, H. 1929. The avifauna of the Emeryville shellmound. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press. University of California Publications in Zoology 32.Google Scholar
Johnson, A.W. & Earle, T. 1987. The evolution of human society: from foraging group to agrarian state. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kirk, R. 1974. Hunters of the whale. New York (NY): Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.Google Scholar
De Laguna, F. 1953. Some problems in the relationship between Tlingit ethnology and archaeology, in Smith, M. (ass.), Asia and North America: transpacific contacts: 53–7. Menasha (WI). Memoir of the Society for American Archaeology 9.Google Scholar
De Laguna, F. 1960. The story of a Tlingit community: a problem in the relationship between archaeological, ethnological, and historical methods. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology. Bulletin 172.Google Scholar
De Laguna, F.K., Riddell, F.A. Mcgeein, D.F. Lane, K.S. Freed, J.A. & Osborne, C. 1964. Archaeology of the Yakutat Bay Area, Alaska. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology. Bulletin 192.Google Scholar
Meighan, C.W. 1965. Pacific Coast archaeology, in Wright, H.E. & Frey, D.C. (ed.), The Quaternary of the United States: 709–20. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Yesner, D.R. 1987. Life in the ‘Garden of Eden’: the causes and consequences of the adoption of marine diets by human societies, in Harris, M. & Ross, E. (ed.), Food and evolution: 285–310. Philadelphia (PA): Temple University Press.Google Scholar