Dissertation
Economics and Integration in a Marpole Phase Plank House Village
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2015
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111107
Abstract
Communities are central elements in human social life. They are
central venues for the transmission of knowledge and socialization
while at the same time, they bring kin and non-kin into regular and
sustained face-to-face interaction. For small-scale societies, in the
absence of regionally integrative institutions (e.g., polities),
communities are a central arena for the reproduction of social life
and, thus, are a key empirical focus for understanding local social
organization and for conducting cross-cultural comparison. The
organization of small-scale communities is in part determined by the
scale, manner, and degree of embeddedness of domestic economies at the
community level and are thus important empirical foci for
understanding social organization in the past.
This study investigates the subsistence economy of a late Marpole
phase (1500 to 1000 BP) village at the Dionisio Point site (DgRv-003) in
southwestern British Columbia, Canada. This 1,500 year-old village was
composed of five contemporaneously occupied post-and-beam
plank-houses. Artifacts and fauna recovered from house refuse middens
offer an opportunity to conduct an analysis of intra-village
subsistence organization.
The village formed relatively rapidly, possibly by all five
households. In spite of variation in house size, patterns of food
production and consumption across houses is consistent substantial
household subsistence autonomy. Smaller households did not
provisioning the largest household nor were foodstuffs extensively
shared between households. Neither village-level economic
centralization, nor communalism, appear to have characterized
household integration within this settlement.
These data are consistent with the argument that late Marpole phase
villages were composed of households with considerable economic
flexibility and that a significant source of inter-household economic
support may have come from social networks linking households in
different villages. Insofar as subsistence practices form the economic
infrastructure of community organization, these data suggest that
although late Marpole villages were often comprised of clustered
dwellings, important economic relations linked households across the
entire region.
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Details
- Title
- Economics and Integration in a Marpole Phase Plank House Village
- Creators
- Patrick Dolan
- Contributors
- Colin F. Grier (Advisor)William Andrefsky (Committee Member)Andrew I. Duff (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 323
- Identifiers
- 99900581439301842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation