In the Salish Sea region, labret adornment with lip plugs signify particular identities, and they are interpreted as emblematic of both membership in horizontal relationships and achieved status for traditional cultures associated with labret wearing on the Northwest Coast (NWC) of North America. Labrets are part of a shared symbolic language in the region, one that we argue facilitated access to beneficial horizontal relationships (e.g., Angelbeck and Grier 2012; Rorabaugh and Shantry 2017). We employ social network analysis (SNA) to examine labrets from 31 dated site components in the Salish Sea region spanning between 3500 and 1500 cal BP. Following this period, the more widely distributed practice of cranial modification as a social marker of status developed in the region. The SNA of labret data shows an elaboration and expansion of antecedent social networks prior to the practice of cranial modification. Understandings of status on the NWC work backward from direct contact with Indigenous societies. Labret wearing begins at the Middle-Late Holocene transition, setting an earlier stage for the horizontal social relationships seen in the ethnohistoric period. These findings are consistent with the practice as signifying restricted group membership based on affinal ties and achieved social status.

Were the ancient Coast Salish farmers? Conventional anthropological wisdom asserts that the ethnographically known communities of the Northwest Coast of North America were “complex hunter-fisher-gatherers” who lacked any form of concerted plant food cultivation and production. Despite decades of extensive ethnobotanical and paleoethnobotanical study throughout the Pacific Northwest demonstrating the contrary, this “classic anomaly” is still a cornerstone of anthropological and archaeological canons. The recent discovery of a spectacularly preserved wetland wapato (Indian potato, Sagittaria latifolia) garden, built 3,800 years ago in Katzie traditional territory near Vancouver, British Columbia, has helped recast this picture, alongside evidence for other forms of resource management practiced by Northwest Coast peoples. This article examines “origins of agriculture” stories from three distinctive perspectives: Coast Salish Katzie people who cultivated wapato for millennia; settlers who colonized the Fraser River Delta historically, bringing with them their own ideas about what constitutes farming; and archaeologists, who are challenged by these data to reevaluate their own understandings of these cultural constructs. These perspectives have critical bearing on the historical appropriation of lands and waterways by settler communities in British Columbia as well as contemporary questions of sovereignty and stewardship in this region and well beyond.

Identifying animals to species from relict proteins is a powerful new archaeological tool. Here the authors apply the method to answer questions relating to the Salish of west coast North America. Did they weave their blankets out of dog hair? The proteomic analysis shows that they did, interweaving it with goat, and that the woolly dog was increasingly superseded by sheep in the later nineteenth century.