•We track 3,000 years of settlement and demographic trends to the present day.•We identify and define a key social grouping, the “settlement constellation”•We find settlement constellations emerge ...from long-term social fissioning.•Radiocarbon evidence demonstrates that households persisted for millennia.
For Indigenous people across the globe, being connected to traditional lands and histories continues to be of paramount importance. To document this connection on one river system in the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, we compiled archaeological evidence from 14 settlements occupied between 3,000 years ago and the early 20th century. We demonstrate how households and lineages persisted inter-generationally, expanded demographically and geographically over time, and forged diverse and nested social groupings and networks. We find compelling evidence for the emergence of a “settlement constellation” that formed through long-term processes of social fissioning. Our analysis moves between social, spatial, and temporal scales, tracking changing settlement patterns and demographic trends to the present day, emphasizing persistent occupational and social continuity between the Sts’ailes today and their ancestors. Extraordinarily long-lived house occupations and settlements are a feature of the Northwest Coast of North America, and may be a significant aspect of settlement constellations more generally.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
A biface workspace dating to ca. cal a.d. 100-400 was identified during recent excavation at the Sts'ailes-Coast Salish village of YāçkEtEl, on the Harrison River on the Northwest Coast of North ...America. Based on a range of analyses, we suggest that a specialist crafted large bifaces produced as prestigious objects for exchange within a ceremonial interaction sphere and smaller, more functional bifaces for household and local purposes. The workspace was a shed-like structure adjacent to their house, and the toolstone was acquired nearby from previously undocumented quarries within the territory. This is the only documented evidence for the manufacture of large prestigious bifaces in the region and consequently provides insights into the social relations of lithic acquisition, production, exchange, and consumption. In particular, we examine the social and economic roles and contributions of lithic specialists embedded within households.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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