week two reading notes

Pre European History

• Natives of the northwest coast are foragers, live wholly on fish, game, wild plants
• Dense populations, permanent villages with wooden houses, socially stratified societies, highly developed art and ceremonies
• Human history began in this region 9 millennia ago
• Insights from History, Ethnography, and Linguistics
• Culture of Northwest Cost in the coastal temperate rainforest
• Extends from mouth of Copper River on Gulf of Alaska to the mouth of the Chetco River near the OR/CA border, inland to Chugach and St. Elias ranges in Alaska, Coast Mountains in BC, and Cascades in WA and OR
• Past tense is only used to describe their pre-European history
• Natives were taller, lighter pigmented than in the north. More commonly had beards
• Came from Northeast Asia thousands of years ago, some Siberian genes
• No support that Natives of the NWC have recent East Asian ancestry
• Over 60 languages spoken throughout region, over 40 of them spoken between OR/CA border and Copper River delta 
• Languages, not dialects, placed into larger groups called phyla
• Seven different unrelated lines of descent
• Starting in the north: Eyak-Athapaskan Family
• Eyak, Athapaskan, Tlingit combine to form the Na-Dene phyla
• Haida is another language in the same region but not part of Na-Dene phyla
• Tsimshian (4 languages), Wakashan (8 languages), Salishan (23 languages), Chimakuan (2 languages)
• Chinookan, Takelman, Alsean, Coosan families found on the Columbia River, and language isolate Siuslaw all in the Penutian Phylum
• The other 40ish languages are placed into two phyla - Na-Dene and Penutian, four families that can't go into any phylum, and Haida who doesn't go in any of them
• Regional features of language unite all over NW Coast - complex phonology, grammar, semantics
• They are unrelated but this does not mean that they CANNOT be related
• Sedentary or semisedentary lifestyle - moved from region seasonally to get food in different places
• This was made possible by well developed woodworking technology, transportation, and storage methods
• Social inequality - elites, commoners, slaves
• Basic social unit - local group with house site or sites, resources, and myths
• Each group was basically autonomous but were linked with other groups through marriage, kinship, participation in ceremonial systems
• Several local groups shared winter settlement (village or town). This formed the group often called a tribe
• Chiefs were just heads of local groups that were able to influence others through wealth and personal ability
• Principles of kinship: matrilineal in the north, bilateral in center and south
• Matrilineal - descent was reckoned through female line
• Bilateral - both parents, a man couldn't marry any known relative
• Potlatch - host transfers wealth to their guests in exchange for recognition of status
• Labret plugs - symbol of participation in matrilineal system to show that they were respectable and marriageable
• Bilateral shape of respectability was modification of head shape 
• Insights from Archaeology
• Early Period (11,000-5500 BP)
• 10,000 years ago
• Earliest sites are Glacier Bay, Hidden Falls, Namu in Alaska and BC
• Manis Mastodon site in NW WA not firmly established but dates back 10-11,0000 years
• Clovis - oldest well documented human culture in North America - dates between 11,200 and 10,900 years ago
• Pacific Period (5500 BP to Contact)
• Marked by evolution of NW Coast culture as encountered in 18th century, is broken into three sub periods
• Early Pacific Subperiod (5500-3500 BP)
• Marked by disappearance of microblade technology and appearance of large shell middens along coast (accumulations of mollusk shells mixed with organic and nonorganic debris produced by human activity)
• Coast ecosystem isn't uniform, local economies changed from bay to bay
• Middle Pacific Subperiod (3500-1500 BP)
• Profound social, cultural, and economic development
• Reliance on salmon, rectangular houses, wealth, beads, clubs, warfare
• Art style was well developed by now
• Late Pacific Subperiod (1500 BP)
• Ethnographically documented societies and cultures were present by beginning of this period
• Marked by profound change in funeral ritual
• In prior two subperiods, some people were burined in shell middens in residential and nonresidential sites, sometimes immediately behind the dead's household