OBSERVATIONS ON THE PREHISTORIC SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC-STRUCTURE OF THE NORTH-AMERICAN PLATEAU

Research at the Keatley Creek site near the Fraser River has provided critical new insights into prehistoric social and economic organizatio n on the Canadian Northwest Plateau. Using a wide range of lithic, fau nal, botanical, and chemical analyses, it has been possible to demonst rate that large residential corporate groups exercised privileged acce ss to the best fishing locations and apparently had rights to differen t mountain regions. These corporate groups maintained these rights as well as their ownership over house locations and specific identities f or over a millennium. Large corporate groups were also divided interna lly 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 abo ut past social and economic organization, appropriate concepts and que stions must be developed from an explicitly archaeological viewpoint r ather than a cultural anthropological or sociological perspective.