The west coast of North America encompasses some of the richest and most diverse maritime environments on earth. Even in their presentday impoverished state, they support major commercial fisheries, large whale migrations and dense sea mammal populations. From the earliest days of European exploration, visitors such as the redoubtable Captain James Cook commented on the rich culture of Pacific coast peoples (Beaglehole 1967). ‘Their life may be said to comprise a constant meal,’ remarked Spanish friar Pedro Fages of the Chumash peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel in southern California. At European contact, between the 16th and 18th centuries AD, the shores of the Bering Strait, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the California coast supported elaborate, sophisticated and sedentary huntergatherer peoples. These decimated and muchchanged societies still enjoyed elaborate ceremonials and intricate social relations as late as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when pioneer anthropologists such as Franz Boas and John Harrington worked among them. From these researches have come classic stereotypes of west coast peoples as ‘complex huntergatherer societies’, some of which were organized in powerful chiefdoms. Peoples like the Tlingit, the Kwakiutl and the Chumash have become the epitome of complex huntergatherers in many archaeologists’ eyes.

The northern Northwest Coast supported some of the most socially complex hunting and gathering societies on the Pacific Coast. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of this region share a rich ethnographic history that reveals hereditary social ranking, sedentary villages, intensive warfare, part-time craft specialization and dense populations. Models developed to explain the origins of social and political complexity among these groups have covered the gamut of theories presented for the rise of complexity in state level societies. As will be demonstrated, not only have archaeologists failed to present a theory that explains the rangeof variability in the data, but on the northern Northwest Coast, the actual timing of the origins of political complexity is suspect.

The emphasis on temporal and geographic scale of the French Annales school of history (cf. Braudel 1980; Baker 1984; Lewthwaite 1988) is the inspiration for this paper. Braudel (1980) divides time into three durations: short term events (days, weeks, months, a few years), medium length conjunctures (years, decades, even major portions of centuries), and longterm structures (which may last centuries, even millennia). This last duration is the longue durée. Basic to Annales’ thought – and the longue durée – is the idea that to understand historical developments, to explain their causes and dynamics, one must know their temporal and their geographic scale; one must know what happened at their edges and their centre, why they developed and why they passed away; and how they changed during their span. To do this, since we cannot assume we know the scales relevant to the phenomena which interest us (Braudel 1980), we must continually play different temporal and geographic scales off against each other.

The central portion of the California ‘culture area’ is a microcosm of the larger California province, which is a patchwork of landforms, microclimates and hydraulic régimes. There are large coastal bays, rugged scrubby foothills, broad intermontane valleys with massive river systems and extensive deltaic wetlands (FIGURE 1).

Among the most complex and specialized hunter-gatherer-fisher societies in the New World, the peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel region of California were considered exceptional by early explorers because of their intense interest in valuables, beads and trade. During the last several centuries before European contact, sedentary populations on the offshore islands and mainland coast participated in an intensive regional exchange network that emerged from important earlier developments in transportation, craft specialization and labour organization. Especially significant in the sociopolitical evolution of this region were changes in the manipulation of domestic labour by a rising elite, expressed through increasing control over the production and distribution of status-rich valuables and critical resources. At historic contact, the Chumash who occupied the mainland coast and the northern Channel Islands (FIGURE 1) were probably organized into several interlinked small chiefdoms.

In this paper we use osteological data to evaluate theories about the rise of chiefdoms in southern California. To do this, we examine skeletal evidence for changes in diet, disease and violence in Santa Barbara Channel area populations. These collections date from before and after the development of large, sedentary coastal villages and a political system that facilitated inter-village economic interaction. Our data show that the health consequences of the development of these chiefdoms are comparable to those seen with the development of complex agricultural societies. They also provide insights into the causes of social complexity in non-agricultural societies.

It has been apparent for some time that the overbearingly rich ethnographic record from the west coast has had an almost numbing effect on thinking about later prehistory from Alaska to the Mexican border. ‘The tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has been a war-cry in archaeology for some time, so there is nothing new in this observation. ‘I hear very little about olden times’, said Franz Boas of the Kwakiutl as long ago as the 1880s, but the archaeologists that followed in his footsteps seem to have forgotten his remark. There has been a tendency to think of the ethnographic record of the 17th-19th centuries AD as a true record of the state of native American society along the west coast before European contact. As Maschner and Ames point out in their papers, nothing could be further from the truth. Ann Ramenovsky (1984), among others, has pointed out that indigenous populations were decimated by smallpox and other infectious diseases very soon after contact, and sometimes even before actual physical meetings with the newcomers. Some of the elaborate cultures observed by Boas and others were, in themselves, responses to changing conditions. The elaboration of the Northwest potlatch is, of course, a well known example of this phenomenon. Here, Ames and Maschner point out that populations may already have been in decline prior to Columbus.