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Archaeologists working in the Salish Sea (Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound) region of the Pacific Northwest have unearthed human burials and non-mortuary features dated to 4000–3500 cal B.P. containing tens and even hundreds of thousands of stone and shell disc beads. Several sites are reported here, including burials recently excavated from site DjRw–14 located in the territory of the shíshálh Nation. We argue that the disc beads constituted an important form of material wealth at this time, based on the amount of labor that would have been required to produce them and the capacity for beads to accrue in value after their production. A model of material wealth-based inequality is developed for a period much older than many archaeologists working in the region have previously thought.

Small villages have been central to progressive models of hunter-gatherer-fisher complexity on the Northwest Coast as a stage in the narrative of increasingly nonegalitarian social relations. We argue that Tsimshian settlement history is more complicated. We examine settlement and chronological data for 66 village sites in the Tsimshian area, 22 of which we define as small. Small villages were present in the area as early as 6500 years ago, but they are also contemporary with larger settlements until after 1300 years ago. We suggest that small villages represent a traditional Tsimshian social entity known as the wilnat’aał, or lineage, knowledge of which is preserved in Tsimshian oral records. We argue that the persistence of this settlement and community form illustrates the foundational role of this social unit throughout Tsimshian history, a result that has implications for archaeological research in the context of Indigenous history.

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