Abstract

In his work among the Kekchi Maya of Belize, Richard Wilk suggested that household integration could be measured along a scale that ranged from 'loose' to 'tight' based on the degree to which households collectively participated in the processes of subsistence production, storage, food preparation and consumption, and transmission of household rights, titles, and capital. Since material correlates can be posited for these different processes, this approach has potential for examining prehistoric household integration with archaeological data. In this paper, the architectural organization and hearth patterning of houses from primarily the central Northwest Coast are examined in order to assess the way in which, and the variability in which, these households were integrated. These data suggest that families within houses, despite being under one roof, were only loosely integrated in many respects, a picture that is consistent with Suttles recent analysis of ethnographic Salish shed-roof houses. Transmission of rights of access to resources appears to have been a primary integrating phenomenon in an otherwise relatively loosely-structured household economy. These observations provide a basis for developing archaeological models for prehistoric central Coast household economic and political organization.