Smoke on the water: uncovering a socially complex pre-contact Babine fishing village at Nass Glee (GISQ-4)

For the last century there has been very little modification to the geographic boundaries for the Northwest coast culture area, as defined by anthropologists.Moreover, complex hunter-gatherer models, which identify the hallmarks for social complexity of coastal First Nations, tend to exclude inland and up-river societies.Although academics recognize a post-contact complexity at Babine Lake, they have relied primarily on ethnographic sources which implied that ranked and socially stratified societies emerged only in response to the social and economic influences of the fur trade.However, recent research indicates that Babine society possessed complex trade networks, ranked houses, inherited lineages, individual wealth, and status inequality long before the fur trade era.Excavations at the salmon fishing village GiSq-4, on the Babine River, indicate that these social attributes have a much greater antiquity than the proto-historic era.Using archaeological and documentary evidence, which was unavailable for much of the last century, this thesis argues that a socially stratified and complex society at Babine Lake pre-dated the fur trade by at least several hundred years.This coastal style social complexity and stratification warrants a re-examination of current archaeological models on the Northwest Coast culture group area.guidance of my supervisory committee.My archaeology supervisor, Dr. Farid Rahemtulla, generously invited me to assist his field research at GiSq-4 and to conduct an analysis on the Babine artifact assemblage for this thesis.I am also grateful for his class readings and our many personal conversations, which were enjoyably comprehensive and which extended across the breadth of complex hunter-gatherer lifeways.My history supervisor, Professor Theodore Binnema, was always encouraging and his inspiring words kept me motivated and focussed enough to complete this thesis.I am grateful to him for his insight on the historical documentation from the Hudson's Bay Company archives in particular, and for his passion on fur trade history in general.I would also like to extend my gratitude to committee member, Karyn Sharp, for helping me narrow my research at the beginning of this journey, when the choices seemed endless.And a special thank you is extended to my external

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