Observations on the prehistoric social and economic structure of the North American Plateau

Abstract

Research at the Keatley Creek site near the Fraser River has provided critical new insights into prehistoric social and economic organization on the Canadian Northwest Plateau. Using a wide range of lithic, faunal, botanical, and chemical analyses, it has been possible to demonstrate that large residential corporate groups exercised privileged access to the best fishing locations and apparently had rights to different mountain regions. These corporate groups maintained these rights as well as their ownership over house locations and specific identities for over a millennium. Large corporate groups were also divided internally into privileged domestic groups and non‐privileged domestic groups, probably reflecting hereditary title‐holding families and commoners or even slaves. I argue that in order to derive useful information about past social and economic organization, appropriate concepts and questions must be developed from an explicitly archaeological viewpoint rather than a cultural anthropological or sociological perspective.