In the Wake of the ya’ aats’ xaatgaay [‘Iron People’]: A study of changing settlement strategies among the Kunghit Haida

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This volume explores changing settlement strategies among the Kunghit Haida of the southern Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. It shows that small, widely dispersed, nucleated villages were typical of the area prior to historical contact with Europeans. This arrangement counters an orthodoxy that sees large multilineage winter villages, with seasonal dispersal to resource locales, as the prevailing pattern. The archaeological data, alongside ethnographic and historical observations, argue for a substantially different prehistoric settlement pattern, with corporate groups exploiting many resources on a year-round basis. A pre-contact pattern involving a greater partitioning of the landscape by competing groups in small nucleated villages accounts for and reconciles some of the ambiguity in the ethnographic and historical literature. The evidence converges to reveal a noticeable shift in Kunghit settlement behaviour, not as the result of a single dramatic event, but as a complex social and cultural process traceable down to the historical period.