ABSTRACT
Low population density is characteristic of most hunter-sher-gatherers, and is variously attributed to resource or technological limitations (Belovsky 1988; Hayden 1981), the effects of a high degree of residential mobility (Kelly 1995:254-257) or even disease (Pennington 2001). Available evidence suggests that early populations on the Pacic Northwest Coast of North America were also characteristically low, yet research on the central coast of British Columbia, within the traditional territory of the Heiltsuk First Nation (Figure 4.1), suggests that resources, technology and mobility did not impose any obvious limitations on early population growth. Settlement expansion did not take place for a period of at least eight millennia, from around 11,000 years ago up to approximately 500 BC, despite clear evidence of sedentary settlement and a storage-based subsistence economy at the village of Namu for at least the last 4500 years of this period, i.e. 5000-500 BC (Cannon and Yang 2006). The space and resources necessary for population expansion were also available, since nearby locations that supported permanent residential settlements in later periods could have done so earlier. The lack of physical constraint on population growth and settlement expansion implies a greater role for choice in the maintenance of population levels than is generally acknowledged in archaeology. In the settlement history of the Namu vicinity, that choice appears to have been based on perceptions of appropriate living standards, which reinforced beliefs concerning the role of ancestral supernatural encounters in establishing a sustaining relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds. Those beliefs ritually reinforced ties to ancestral places in the landscape. The initial selection of a residential locality, together with the ritual reinforcement of the ancestral and supernatural basis of its selection, may have established exceptionally high standards for the recognition and acceptance of similar residential/ritual locations. As a consequence, people may have consciously constrained population growth to sustain living standards within the capacity of the ritual/residential place, rather than the greater landscape in
which it was located. Minor, but discernable physical advantages of the Namu location likely only reinforced perceptions of its appropriateness as a place of residence. These would further support the providential basis of initial settlement and more narrowly dene acceptable standards for alternative residential sites.
