From local to regional and back again: Social transformation in a Coast Salish settlement, 1500–1000 BP

Abstract Households link micro and macro scales of social interactions, and both reflect and initiate social transformations, from the scale of the house to the region. Despite their potential interpretive efficacy, few studies scale up from interpretations of household dynamics to that of the larger social landscape. We examine local and regional social changes by documenting changing interactions between households at the large Sts’ailes-Coast Salish settlement of Hiqelem on the Harrison River. We focus on the period 1500 to 1000 years ago – a transformative period across the Pacific Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau marked by changes in burial practices, the intensification of warfare, new technologies, and by larger settlements exhibiting ranked social status. Shifts in house(hold) and settlement structure at Hiqelem reveal how these region-wide changes were manifest in social groupings at the local level and how social changes at the local level in turn reverberate throughout the nested social networks characteristic of the region. We detect several related changes at Hiqelem including an increased number of houses, the formation of local groups, the co-occurrence for the first time of pithouses and plank houses, the relocation of houses, increasing segmentation and autonomy of households, and significant differences among house sizes.