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Rewriting Marpole: The Path to Cultural Complexity in the Gulf of Georgia Region Terence N. Clark Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013. 200 pp. $55.00 paper.
Rewriting Marpole is the published version of Clark's PhD dissertation (Clark 2010) and an outgrowth of his MA thesis (Clark 2000). The primary goal ofhis research "is to determine the spatial and temporal extent of Marpole" (1); the secondary goal is to examine the processes under which social complexity, as equated with Marpole, arose in the Salish Sea region (3). Clark utilizes an innovative array of multivariate statistical techniques to identify spatial and temporal relationships between culture-historical units and, perhaps most important, to equate language groups with such units. In doing so, he greatly refines the culture-historical sequence and provides considerable new insight into our understanding of the spatio-temporal extent of such culture-historical units in the Salish Sea. (For reasons that are unclear, Clark adheres to the old name "Strait of Georgia" for this body of water.)
In my opinion, unlike with his successful cultural historical enterprise, in Rewriting Marpole Clark's application of these methods to explaining the origins of social complexity misses the mark. I am unconvinced that his method, as laid out, is able to identify or describe "social complexity" in anyway other than automatically associating it with Marpole Phase sites/assemblages. A much more detailed review of variable indicators and measures of cultural complexity within Marpole Phase versus non-Marpole Phase sites would have been a very strong addition to this book. I think Clark missed an opportunity to comment on another cultural phase that involved the origins of social complexity - the "Classic Lillooet" Phase - and that was coeval with, and practically adjacent to, Marpole.
Clark's multivariate statistical methods, termed integrative distance analysis (ida), represent an outgrowth in both the complexity of techniques and in the number of site assemblages considered in a long trajectory of multivariate comparison of artefact assemblages in the Salish Sea region (Burley 1980; Clark 2000; Matson 1974, 2010; Matson, Ludowicz, and Boyd 1980; Thom 1992; Thompson 1978). Such analyses have identified subphases within regional cultures, such as the Garrison, Beach Grove, and Old Musqueam subphases of Marpole (Matson et al. 1980; Matson and Coupland 1995, 213). Clark's (2000) earlier research realigned...