Abstract

Culture history construction, while a necessary archaeological enterprise, is essentially a classificatory device that requires a reductionist approach to data and explanation. Thus, the key to conceptualizing and explaining trajectories of change in Northwest Coast prehistory does not lie solely in developing increasingly specific and localized culture histories, but rather in articulating how various scales of temporal and spatial analysis mesh within an overall problem framework that stipulates variables and processes critical for explaining economic, social, and political developments. In this paper, I illustrate this perspective by conceptualizing problems in Gulf of Georgia prehistory at four separate analytical scales - the region, the sub-region, the village, and the household.