Cultural collapses in the Northwest: a reply to Ian Kuijt

We previously suggested that the abandonment of large housepit villages along the Mid-Fraser River ca. 1200 B.P. was due to landslides that decimated salmon stocks and the main subsistence staples of the villages. Kuijt has questioned the plausibility of such a scenario. However, he confuses the two landslide episodes we discuss and raises unrealistic expectations about lake formation, migration behavior, and residual populations. He also confuses the lacustrine vs. fluvial effects of landslide blockages. While he attributes to us specific interpretations to which we are not tied and which are not critical for our basic argument, he offers no real alternative explanation for why the large Mid-Fraser villages were abandoned.
Ian Kuijt (2001) recently criticized our interpretation of the abandonment of large pithouse villages in the Lillooet area as due to massive landslides that decimated the salmon runs that were [...]