Pacific Northwest

Overview

During Pre-Colonial times, the Indigenous people of North America’s Pacific Northwest region maintained permanent villages often occupied year-round (Figure 1). Densely aggregated groups pursued delayed-return subsistence economies focused on fishing, hunting, and gathering. Social organization was often ranked with distinct hereditary and achievement-based classes of chiefly elites, commoners, and in some contexts, slaves. House groups participated in a ritual economy that included extensive exchange, feasting, and ritual gifting (potlatching, for example) designed to signal community standing.

Archaeological research in the Fraser River drainage illustrates variability in the histories of different groups. Data from the Lower Fraser suggests a high degree of demographic stability during the past 4000 years, while the more arid Mid-Fraser exhibits a classic boom and bust pattern across the period of 2000-500 years ago (Figure 2). Mid-Fraser villages at peak sizes included ring-shaped arrangements of houses with indicators of intra- and inter-house material wealth-based inequality. Subsistence strategies during these demographic cycles appear to have shifted between periods of narrower and broader diets.