Monumentality of houses: Collective action, inequality, and kinship in pithouse construction

Houses in archaeological interpretation are normally considered the nexus of everyday activity. We consider house construction as a departure from everyday activity and suggest these events could have provided opportunities to (re)define social relationships as well as structure social relationships within extended kin-based household and cooperative groups. We examine the construction of large semi-subterranean pithouses at the Slocan Narrows site in the interior Pacific Northwest. With collective effort, the pithouses likely required months of labor to construct. Drawing from approaches to monumentality, we focus house construction processes that integrate people into cooperative groups, providing opportunities for sociopolitical and economic bottlenecks in the control of labor and resources, and create permanent and visible material signals of collective action and identities. Considering houses within this framework, we interpret the pithouses at Slocan Narrows in a very different way than those at other sites in the interior Pacific Northwest. We draw on a case study of a modern event of pithouse construction led by Sinixt First Nation elders at the Vallican Site, which we use to help understand the process of pithouse construction, village aggregation, and dissolution at the Slocan Narrows site over the course of 3, 100 years of occupation.