The emergence of cultural complexity on the west coast of North America

It has been apparent for some time that the overbearingly rich ethnographic record from the west coast has had an almost numbing effect on thinking about later prehistory from Alaska to the Mexican border. ‘The tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has been a war-cry in archaeology for some time, so there is nothing new in this observation. ‘I hear very little about olden times’, said Franz Boas of the Kwakiutl as long ago as the 1880s, but the archaeologists that followed in his footsteps seem to have forgotten his remark. There has been a tendency to think of the ethnographic record of the 17th-19th centuries AD as a true record of the state of native American society along the west coast before European contact. As Maschner and Ames point out in their papers, nothing could be further from the truth. Ann Ramenovsky (1984), among others, has pointed out that indigenous populations were decimated by smallpox and other infectious diseases very soon after contact, and sometimes even before actual physical meetings with the newcomers. Some of the elaborate cultures observed by Boas and others were, in themselves, responses to changing conditions. The elaboration of the Northwest potlatch is, of course, a well known example of this phenomenon. Here, Ames and Maschner point out that populations may already have been in decline prior to Columbus.