The Maritime Cultures of the Northwest Pacific Seaboard of the Americas

The Indigenous people who occupied (and continue to occupy) the northwest Pacific coastline of the Americas inhabit an anthropological culture area known as the ‘Northwest Coast’. This chapter draws from the archaeological record to expand upon the portrait of Northwest Coast societies developed from historical and ethnographic sources. The historical and ethnographic sources, of course, encapsulate some of the experiences of contact and colonialism over the last 250 years. But ‘pre-contact times’ cannot be reconstructed or known for certain, and material cultures, lifeways, population sizes and distributions, and the scale of social networks have all been transformed since the first European contacts. The Northwest Coast societies documented in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries are not simulacra of pre-contact societies, although archaeologists inevitably deploy them as such.