| Abstract: |
The long-term perspective of archaeology and history makes it possible to trace the life history of structures in concert with that of the people associated with them, by observing how the transformations of physical houses may materially encode the correlative changes to the social groups that occupied them. Yvonne Marshall demonstrates the important diachronic perspective in the analysis of house societies with her meticulously researched overview of both the stasis and the change experienced by the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) houses. Her examination of a Northwest Coast people, one of Lévi-Strausss original exemplars of house societies, also fills in missing details from his defining work by examining the relationship between the material and social reproductive aspects of houses. She begins with archaeological evidence some 2000 years old that reveals not only the remarkable longevity of house form and internal organization as described by much later European observers, but also the continuity in house location, a curation of established house placements. In contrast, the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries saw rapid demographic and economic changes, accessible from historical and archival records, that transformed Nuu-chah-nulth society. In this short period the physical house changed from an externally undifferentiated residence, housing people, to an externally elaborated but essentially vacant building, housing paraphernalia and symbolizing the increased wealth of the social group that maintained its ritual and representative functions, materializing accentuated hierarchical differences. In a matter of decades, even this form disappeared as the social houses gave way to the new sociopolitical configuration based on wage labor and a cash economy. These changes in the physical house relate directly to house formation and definition. Its corporate identity derived from the cooperative labors of its members in subsistence activities on house-owned lands. With the loss of participation in the communal labor that generated house wealth, the house as an economic institution ceased to exist. Marshall, like Sandstrom, concludes that the house has a fundamental economic and pragmatic base and must be continously performed into existence by communal investment in its resources.
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