Long-term human-environment interaction on dynamic coastal landscapes : examples from 15,000 years of shoreline and settlement change in the Prince Rupert Harbour area ...

• Main Author: Letham, Bryn
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2017
• Subjects: Tsimshian; Tsimshian*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0355838; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0355838

This dissertation explores the intersections of past human settlement and the dynamism of coastal landscapes in the Prince Rupert Harbour area, in Tsimshian territory on the northern Northwest Coast, British Columbia. Taking relative sea level (RSL) and shoreline change as a major physical force in coastal people’s lives, both past and present, I explore how coastal fisher-hunter-gatherers occupied this transforming landscape and ultimately consider ways in which people’s engagement with the shores they lived upon may have been generative of new relationships to place and people. A reconstruction of the history of RSL change over the last 15,000 years is developed and presented. This is used to design a predictive model for landforms ideal for human habitation associated with raised paleoshorelines. A field survey of several of these targets identified three archaeological sites dating between 9500 and 6000 BP, pushing the archaeologically-recorded occupation of the area back 3000 years. These early Holocene ...