Long term histories and archaeology of the Stave Watershed Region of southwestern British Columbia
Date
2003
Authors
McLaren, Duncan
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Abstract
This thesis explores multiple ways in which long-term history is constructed, described, and enacted. The goal of undertaking this research is to discover if different long-term historical approaches provide compatible perspectives of the past. Five different approaches to the late-Pleistocene and Holocene histories of the Stave Watershed region of British Columbia are investigated. These approaches include palaeo-environmental history, Coast Salish oral tradition, the cultural-historical sequence, and two sequences based on the analysis of surface collected archaeological data from fifty sites in the study area. The last two sequences employed the use of a seriation analysis to temporally order formed bifaces and site locations, and a cluster analysis to characterize different land-use and settlement patterns in the study area through time. The long-term histories are compared, contrasted, and tabulated to demonstrate the interrelatedness of sequences and to gain an understanding of the role of social memory in enacting tradition.