Abstract

British Columbia spans significant portions of the Northwest Coast, Plateau and Subarctic culture areas as usually defined for aboriginal North America. However, in comparison to the considerable amount of information now available for its Northwest Coast and Plateau segments, the precontact human story of Subarctic British Columbia still has received no published synthesis. This paper will offer an initial summary and discussion of the late prehistory (i.e. the last ca. 5,000 years) of that large region.It has long been presumed that access to salmon was a significant factor increasing human populations and heightening cultural complexity on the adjacent Northwest Coast and Plateau. The validity of that notion for Subarctic British Columbia will be tested by comparing the late prehistoric cultural records of its 'salmon' vs. 'non-salmon areas. Attention also will be paid to that persistent question of how long Athapaskan groups may have occupied their ethnographic territories in Subarctic BC and who (if anyone) lived there before them. Related to that is the possibility that such pre-contact ethnolinguistic distributions also were linked to a differential availability of salmon.