Emerging from the Mist: Studies in Northwest Coast Culture History

Keith Thor Carlson is an assistant professor of history at the
University of Saskatchewan. He is the editor of the Stу:lo-Coast Salish
Historial Atlas.

Something new and exciting is taking place in archaeology labs, the
significance of which is as genuinely transdisciplinary as the
approaches of the majority of the authors contributing to Emerging from
the Mist are interdisciplinary. The book is indicative of the quiet
shift occurring within Northwest Coast archaeology away from a penchant
for antiquity and toward a more balanced interest in all time periods,
including the previously ignored European contact era. Methodologically,
this means less reliance on “ethnographic back streaming,” the
result being that the articles here are genuinely informing and
contributing to discussions previously regarded the domain of
anthropologists and historians.

Several essays in the collection attempt interdisciplinarity more
directly, and achieve it more effectively, than others. Andrew
Martindale, for example, couples his archaeological assessment of
indigenous settlement patterns with a fresh reading of the early
ethnographies, historical documents, and indigenous oral traditions to
argue that Tsimshian engagement with European fur traders in the late
18th and early 19th centuries resulted in the emergence of an
“insipient paramount chiefdom.” Similarly, Alan McMillan uses new
archaeological data and interpretive models to revive the view that
Wakashan migrations account for the northern division of Coast Salish
language families. And Quentin Mackie’s analysis of shell midden
distribution on the west coast of Vancouver Island reminds us of the
need to distinguish between different types of indigenous settlements;
for as with non-Native cities, towns, and villages, different indigenous
settlements served different social functions that were as often a
product of scale as scale was a reflection of social function.

This is not to imply that archaeology now holds the answers to all
outstanding ethno-historical and ethnographic questions. Historians and
ethnographers will not necessarily agree with all the interpretations
presented in Emerging from the Mist; nor will they always accept the way
documentary and ethnographic evidence has been employed by scholars
trained in archaeology. Some readers will be frustrated that certain
essays engage in cross-disciplinary critiques without fully situating
themselves within the existing historiography. These matters, however,
will no doubt work themselves out as the transdisciplinary dialogue
continues.