Columbia plateau socio-political organization as seen through an anarchist framework: Conflict as resistence to centralization.

• Summed probability distribution modelling of house and conflict data from the Columbia Plateau of North America. • Gini coefficient of modelling of grave goods as an indicator of wealth inequality. • Application of anarchist theory to ethnographic and archaeological data. • Ethnographic and archaeological records can be seen as complimentary accounts of historic processes. • Identifying future areas of inquiry that are needed within the Columbia Plateau. The Columbia-Fraser Plateau of Northwestern North America was inhabited by complex hunter-gatherer populations throughout the Late Holocene. Archaeological studies have typically characterized these peoples as having corporate households and wealth inequality. Ethnographic accounts emphasize the societies of this region as egalitarian communities and pacifist. In this paper we compare radiocarbon dates for semi-subterranean houses with legacy data for skeletal remains with trauma, mesa-top and island habitations, and storage caves to identify patterns in semi-sedentary settlement and conflict. Additionally, analysis of wealth inequality is conducted using legacy data of burials from throughout the Columbia Plateau. The radiocarbon dataset and legacy data can be reconciled with ethnographic patterns using an anarchist theoretical framework, to provide a potential explanation of the historical changes in socio-economic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]