ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Landscape and Geological Processes
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fearc.2025.1613245
This article is part of the Research TopicIndigenous Maritime ArchaeologyView all articles
Modelling Coast Salish Landscape/ Seascape Use and Territory with GIS
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute for Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
- 2Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
- 3Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
- 4Esri, North Vancouver BC, Canada
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
In this paper we use Least Cost Analysis (LCA) and GIS to model site catchments for villages from two Coast Salish tribes – Tsleil-Waututh and Sts’ailes. Here, we use Tobler’s Hiker Function (Tobler 1993) to model travel by land and develop a cost raster for travel by water in canoes. This model is then used to describe the site catchments for a number of villages. Comparison of the LCA model with recorded resource use patterns and modern hiking and canoeing times suggest that the model accurately describes traditional landscape and seascape use. The shape and size site catchments emphasize the importance of canoe travel in structuring Coast Salish daily foraging radii (~13 km). The large size site catchments of individual villages indicates that even one centrally-placed village could have exploited much of the tribal territory on a near-daily basis. Further, we find correspondence between our LCA modelled use areas and observed use areas, and the extent of each tribes’ respective territory, indicating that the model is accurate in predicting past use areas, and that such use areas closely reflect the metes and bounds of a tribes’ territory.
Keywords: Coast salish, canoe travel, Least Cost Catchment, GIS, modelling
Received: 16 Apr 2025; Accepted: 11 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Morin, Ritchie, Blake and Hunt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jesse Morin, Institute for Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.