Roy L. Carlson

Trade and Exchange in Prehistoric British Columbia

British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada, encompasses about 366,255 square miles of highly varied landscape that in 1775, the beginning of the historic period in this area, supported an aboriginal population conservatively estimated at only 74,400 people (Borden 1954:189). The major population centers were along the coast and on the lower reaches of the major river systems (the Fraser, Bella Coola, Nass, Skeena, and Stikine), which flow westward through the coastal mountain ranges from the interior plateaux. These rivers connect to the inside passage, a coastal network of protected channels and fjords that runs from Alaska south through British Columbia to Puget Sound in Washington, and together they formed the main routes of interregional communication and commerce. Both cultural complexity and population density were highest on the coast and lowest in the further reaches of the interior with various intervening intergradations (Kroeber 1939).

Book Reviews : P. L. Shinnie, (ed.), The African Iron Age. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, pp. 281, plates, figures, 3.00

trous effect Lumumba might have had as leader of the Congo were justified. But whether he sympathized with Lumumba or not, an effective diplomaat should surely have been able to understand those elements of discontent and change in Congolese society to which Lumumba appealed. On the evidence he offers, Scott did not. In accounting for, say, British acquiescence in Katanga’s attempts at secession, or more recently her insensitivity to African feelings over the Rhodesian UDI, one wonders whether perhaps too much weight has been given to calculable economic and other inter ests, and not enough to the blinkered reporting of the man on the spot.