Abstract

Ethnologists/ethnohistorians have used two basic approaches to identify subareas within the Northwest Coast culture area: 1) evaluation of overall cultural similarities based on either generalized impressionistic methods or on numerical taxonomies of similarity coefficients based on numerous culture traits of a sample of ethnic units and 2) qualitative evaluations that focus on one or a few key diagnostic traits. I compare the various subareal approaches that have resulted from the more influential of these efforts and then consider what use archaeologists might make of these methods and results in their own explorations of the prehistoric subregions of the Northwest Coast.