Evolution of the Okvik/Old Bering Sea culture of the Bering Strait as a major transition

Great transitions are thought to embody major shifts in locus of selection,labour diversification and communication systems. Such expectations arerelevant for biological and cultural systems as decades of research hasdemonstrated similar dynamics within the evolution of culture. The evolutionof the Neo-Inuit cultural tradition in the Bering Strait provides anideal context for examination of cultural transitions. The Okvik/OldBering Sea (Okvik/OBS) culture of Bering Strait is the first representativeof the Neo-Inuit tradition. Archaeological evidence drawn for settlementand subsistence data, technological traditions and mortuary contextssuggests that Okvik/OBS fits the definition of a major transition givenchange in the nature of group membership (from families to politicalgroups with social ranking), task organization (emergent labour specialization)and communication (advent of complex art forms conveying socialand ideological information). This permits us to develop a number of implications about the evolutionary process recognizing that transitions mayoccur on three scales: (1) ephemeral variants, as for example, simple technological entities; (2) integrated systems, spanning modular technology tosocio-economic strategies; and (3) simultaneous change across all scaleswith emergent properties.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Human socio-cultural evolution inlight of evolutionary transitions’

Entering Sacred Landscapes: Cultural Expectations Versus Legal Realities in the Northwestern Plains

The spiritual part of this earth is as powerful, maybe more powerful than the physical life that we have - that we understand. We have lived in the spiritual environment, and are very much aware of its powers. The certain power places that have certain gifts to man, such as the Covenants, the many Teachings, the many blessings that come from these places-these places we call the Holy Places. The Holy Places are the spiritual environment that we have come to understand, that here is a place that the teachings, the Covenants, are received

The Evolution of Material Wealth-Based Inequality: The Record of Housepit 54, Bridge River, British Columbia

The evolution of material wealth-based inequality is an important topic in archaeological research. While a number of explanatory models have been proposed, rarely have they been adequately tested. A significant challenge to testing such models concerns our ability to define distinct, temporally short-term, residential occupations in the archaeological record. Sites often lack evidence for temporally persistent inequality, or, when present, the palimpsest nature of the deposits often make it difficult to define the processes of change on scales that are fine enough to evaluate nuanced model predictions. In this article, we use the detailed record of Housepit 54 from the Bridge River site, interior British Columbia, to evaluate several alternative hypotheses regarding the evolution of persistent material wealth-based inequality. Results of our analyses indicate that inequality appeared abruptly coincident with a decline in intra-house cooperation associated with population packing and the initiationof periodic subsistence stress. We conclude that persistent inequality in this context was a byproduct of altered social networks linked to a Malthusian transition and ceiling