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The emergence of cultural complexity on the northern Northwest Coast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Herbert D. G. Maschner
Herbert D. G. Maschner*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara CA 93106, USA
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Extract

The northern Northwest Coast supported some of the most socially complex hunting and gathering societies on the Pacific Coast. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of this region share a rich ethnographic history that reveals hereditary social ranking, sedentary villages, intensive warfare, part-time craft specialization and dense populations. Models developed to explain the origins of social and political complexity among these groups have covered the gamut of theories presented for the rise of complexity in state level societies. As will be demonstrated, not only have archaeologists failed to present a theory that explains the rangeof variability in the data, but on the northern Northwest Coast, the actual timing of the origins of political complexity is suspect.

Type
Special section
Information
Antiquity , Volume 65 , Issue 249 , December 1991 , pp. 924 - 934
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1991

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