Keatley Creek Archaeological Site


Keatley Creek is a significant archaeological site in the interior of British Columbia and in the traditional territory of the St'at'imc peoples. Its location is in the Glen Fraser area of the Fraser Canyon ranchlands about 18 miles from the town of Lillooet on a benchland flanking Keatley Creek, whose name derives from a former ranch owner, and from which the site takes its name.
The site is home to more than 115 pit house depressions, left from semi-subterranean wooden dwellings, some of which would have been 18 to 21 meters in diameter. The site is one of the largest and well-studied house pit village sites in Canada, home to some of the biggest house pit depressions in the archaeological record.
Researchers believe that the site was first inhabited as early as 7,000 Before Present. A large complex community whose economy centered around gathering, fishing, and hunting began developing from 4,800 BP. The Keatley Creek site blossomed from around 2,400 BP with a population of about 1,000 people. At this time the network of villages in the Mid-Fraser region would have been one of the largest pre-contact aboriginal communities in the modern borders of Canada. Although there is continued debate about the site's occupation and abandonment or depopulation, the community was vacated perhaps as early as 1,000 BP or as late as 800 BP, as were the other neighboring villages. No decisive evidence has been found of either warfare or a devastating epidemic, although this as well as an environmental catastrophe or climate change have all been theorized, and aboriginal peoples continued living throughout the region.
Keatley Creek holds a special heritage importance to First Nations communities. Since the mid-1980s the site has also been the subject of the Simon Fraser University's Fraser River Investigations into Corporate Group Archaeology Project, led by Brian Hayden, as well as other research projects led by Anne Marie Prentiss. It is now a provincially recognized cultural heritage area and also gaining international attention through interest at a UNESCO research forum.

Overview

Location

The Keatley Creek Site is an archaeological excavation site in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and is today located within the traditional territory of the St'at'imc First Nation and the P'egp'íg7lha clan. The site is situated on the British Columbia Plateau about 25 km upstream along the Fraser River in what is called the Middle Fraser Canyon or "Mid-Fraser". The site is between the P'egp'íg7lha communities of Xaxlip and Ts'kwaylacw. The closest town is Lillooet.
Keatley Creek is "...nestled in a small basin at the back edge of a Pleistocene river terrace where it meets the mountain slope over 1,200 ft. above the Fraser River" on terrain described as "benchlands above the Fraser River gorge".
The village was close to many other small and medium communities including the down-river villages of Seton Lake, Lillooet, Bridge River, Fountain and Bell, as well as, upriver, Pavilion, McKay Creek, Chicken Gully, and Kelly Creek/Pełtêqet. Several of these villages have now been destroyed. Of the remaining Plateau Pithouse Tradition housepit village settlements in the Mid-Fraser region, only the Kelly Creek and Keatley Creek sites are larger than one hundred depressions, although large villages have also been identified along the Upper Chilcotin, South Thompson, and Slocan River. This so-called zenith in the population is known as the Classic Lillooet Phase., where the villages existed in some form of network—either relatively autonomously or with multi-village communities.

The site

The site itself stretches over a kilometer, with the core area with the greatest concentration of house pits covering in a four hectare radius. The site supported a lengthy period of human occupation, and was one of the largest villages in the Mid-Fraser region. Earliest carbon dating puts initial occupation around 7,000–8,000 BP. The site was more or less consistently occupied from the Shuswap horizon through the Plateau horizon and into the early Kamloops horizon.
The site features include 119 house depressions called a house pit or Quiggly hole. Keatley Creek is "known for the unusually large size of its semi-subterranean houses" some more than 20 meters in diameter, although many are no larger than 5 meters. Archaeological investigation has concluded the Keatley Creek area was occupied by "residential corporate groups of differing economic and social status" which can also be described as a transegalitarian community.

Village life

At its peak population, Keatley Creek's population numbered over 700 people and probably around 1,000. Tools, baskets and hunting weapons found in excavations of Keatley Creek indicate that its ancient inhabitants had been the Stl'atl'imx, a Salish-speaking people who were gatherer-hunter-fishers living during the cold winter months in pit houses, and engaging in a variety of forms of food storage that included both harvest and material storage, and husbandry of one domesticated animal, the dog. Life in the ancient village continues to capture people's interest and imagination. The house pit village in some ways lends itself to the creation of a material history, as Anne Marie Prentiss explains:

Housepit villages such as Keatley Creek and Bridge River developed over hundreds of years. The archaeological record of many housepits formed through regular reoccupations organized around cleaning and rebuilding activities. An early researcher in this area, James Teit recorded that people constructed them by first digging a pit and then acquiring wood for upright posts and horizontal beams. The wood superstructure was then built by using strong upright posts to support the horizontal beams. Layers of timbers and matting covered the roof, and in some cases sediments sealed the construction, offering extra insulation. People dug pits indoors and lined them with birch bark to store food. They constructed hearths and made benches and storage platforms. Aside from regular cleaning, a family could live in such a house for up to 20 years without significant architectural modification. At some point, however, wood would become dangerously old, and vermin could infest portions of the roof and floor. In these cases, good timbers would be salvaged and the old roof burned down. Families returning from late warm-season food-gathering trips would then rebuild roofs and floors before they re-inhabited the houses. Sometimes rebuilding involved removing all of the burned roof materials and scraping out the old floors. At other times, as with many Bridge River houses, the people would remove burned and collapsed roof materials but not the floors. Instead, they would import new sediments and dump them over the old floors, thereby preserving an even more detailed record of household life over multiple generations.

It is worth noting that the Keatley Creek and Bridge River sites have some differences in housepit formation. At Keatley, houses generally consist of the final inhabitant's floor; previous floors and roofs are re-deposited on rims.
Keatley Creek society was part of the spectrum of complex gatherer-hunter-fisher societies. Such sedentism is widespread in the archaeological record. At the same time, the pithouse villages along the Mid-Fraser are arguably "among the largest hunter-gatherer settlements recorded anywhere in the world for any period. They are much larger than most, if not all, prehistoric villages on the adjacent Northwest Coast. The only precontact settlements of comparable size within the modern borders of Canada were the horticultural Iroquoian villages of southern Ontario."

Dynamic seasonal round

Archaeologists have argued for at least a basic level of cultural continuity in the region, noting the consistency between traditional knowledge, oral and written historical records with the archaeological evidence. This suggests that the yearly round or seasonal life movements of the inhabitants of Keatley Creek were likely in general accord with those recorded in traditional ethnography. Hayden and Spafford suggest:

In the fall, large stores of salmon would be caught and dried along the Fraser River for winter food. After the fishing ended, the major deer hunt of the year took place in the alpine meadows. When cold weather set in, everyone would retreat to winter villages on the terraces of the Fraser River, where fish, meat, and plant foods were stored. During the winter, families lived in pithouses dug partly into the ground and covered with a conical wooden roof on which soil and sediment was piled for insulation, much like the roof of historical sod-covered cabins. Entry was generally via a ladder protruding through the smoke hole of the roof; and we think that people were relatively tightly bunched together in these houses for warmth during the frigid winters. By March, the people were anxious to move into the open and began to look for the first edible plant shoots and bulbs, such as young raspberry shoots and wild onions. Spring was often a time of hunger if winter food stores had been used up, and the first signs of spring salmon were eagerly awaited. When the snows had cleared in the mountains, most groups went to dig spring beauty corms and mountain lilies, as well as hunt and fish in the mountain lakes. In mid to late summer, people gathered saskatoon and other berries as they ripened at lower elevations. By late summer, everyone was back down at the river fishing sites preparing fish for the winter and trading with visitors.

Therefore, although a critical amount of nutrition came from gathered foods and deer also supplemented nutrition, salmon fishery was a key source of nutrients. Trade and exchange for dried salmon also brought together goods from considerable distances away, like ground stone bowls, obsidian, and nephrite jade. Sockeye, Chinook, Chum and Coho salmon were available from August to October and were caught, dried, and stored for later use throughout the winter.
Chinook and Sockeye were, in the ethnographic record, preferred over Chum and Coho because of their stronger, richer flavor, although they also take longer to dry. Salmon DNA studies show that during the period Keatley Creek was inhabited, pink salmon, a fish known as easy to catch and easy to dry, were absent from the region.
At the same time, palynology, alluvial stratigraphy, paleo-oceanography, and studies of pre-history now show the climate, and likely also the seasonal round, varied significantly in the region with a dry interval followed by a cool, moist time and then return to dry interval, corresponding with the Medieval Warm Period. These changes would have also affected salmon populations, with growth in the salmon population during the cooler, moist era and reduction during the warmer periods.

Social organization

The presence of somewhat unequal pit house sizes, storage pits, as well as differences in the type and quality of dietary and lithic remains, have meant that Keatley Creek has become an important archaeological site in debates about the development of social inequality.
Initial research formulated that "mass harvest and storage permitted sedentismand inequality in natural abundances led to social inequalities." Certainly, winter survival relied on extensive use of food storage, which became all the more real as the population of Keatley Creek grew. Storage technologies in the mid-Fraser were varied and included cache pits, above-ground facilities, baskets, and cords.
In this direction, three types of "corporate groups" were reportedly identified in the Keatley Creek village: several families living in the same structure, an individual family in its own structure, and large amorphous residential groups assembled, such as a neighborhood. Studies indicate an early socioeconomic strategy and signs of sociopolitical complexity suggesting domestic subgroups within households and within the community at large especially in the final centuries of Keatley Creek's occupation. The biggest dwellings have the largest storage capacity, more prestige foods and lithics such as obsidian, steatite and nephrite which would have been difficult to obtain. Following from this analysis, the four largest pit homes represent the accommodations of multi-household clans or otherwise higher status social groups. Dogs were also kept by higher status dwellings for "hunting, transportation, protection and companionship, clothing, weaving materials, ritual, and food."
Subsequent research has reconsidered the relationship between economic stratification and salmon species distribution at Keatley Creek as "visible but clearly not as dramatic as previously assumed" because of the over-all prevalence of chinook salmon. Some archaeologists have also suggested that social stratification took place not during a moment of population growth, but social contraction due to internal or external contradictions facing Keatley Creek. Therefore, "the pattern of inequality was not triggered by any major technological changes or expansions in per-capita storage. Rather, it appears to have come as a consequence of households changing the rules of food sharing and consumption under stressful conditions."

Excavation and research

Keatley Creek has been the site of active excavations from 1986 and ongoing in 2013–present. The main projects have been led by Brian Hayden and Anna Marie Prentiss.

Hayden Project

In 1986, Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, began the initial project at Keatley Creek. That study's initial aim was to "determine why this site was so large and why some of the individual semisubterranean housepits were also unusually big." Hayden's group was also interested in the cultural continuity in the region and exploring houses where multiple families lived in what were described as "residential corporate groups" Hayden's expedition examined the botanical, faunal, and lithic remains at the site and explored the formation of different types of strata and construction, closely examining floors, roofs, middens, and hearths. They sought to identify activities and social habits that occurred at Keatley Creek through examining stone artifacts and debitage. The nature of each structure was examined in order to compare the "economic and social organization" of the residences. Over the years, Hayden's excavations have expanded, and his work continued with varied hypotheses. Ongoing studies have been documented in several publications:
  • Hayden, Brian. The pithouses of Keatley Creek: Complex hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Plateau. Toronto: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997.
  • Hayden, Brian. "Pathways to power: principles for creating socioeconomic inequalities." Foundations of social inequality : 15–86.
  • Speller, Camilla F., Dongya Y. Yang, and Brian Hayden. "Ancient DNA investigation of prehistoric salmon resource utilization at Keatley Creek, British Columbia, Canada." Journal of Archaeological Science 32.9 : 1378–1389.
  • Hayden, Brian, Nora Franco, and Jim Spafford. "Evaluating lithic strategies and design criteria." Stone tools: Theoretical insights into human prehistory : 9–45.
  • Hayden, Brian, Edward Bakewell, and Rob Gargett. "The world's longest-lived corporate group: Lithic analysis reveals prehistoric social organization near Lillooet, British Columbia." American antiquity : 341–356.
  • Hayden, Brian, and June M. Ryder. "Prehistoric cultural collapse in the Lillooet area." American Antiquity : 50–65.
  • Hayden, Brian, and Rick Schulting. "The plateau interaction sphere and late prehistoric cultural complexity." American antiquity : 51–85.

    Prentiss Project

Anna Marie Prentiss of the University of Montana has included Keatley Creek in her study of Plateau villages throughout prehistory. She has explored the evolution of variations in the Plateau villages, including the need to draw distinctions between "socioeconomically 'complex' communities and those designated as 'sociopolitically' complex." She anticipated that findings at Keatley Creek would contribute to understanding the distribution of ethnographic cultures in the region. Additionally, her work identified the possibility that the Keatley Creek community had emerged as a "complex collector socioeconomic strategy." Her study of Keatley Creek Site contributes to her exploration of the "rise and fall of human societies during that long time span we call the Archaic." Prentiss' studies have been numerous and documented in several publications such as:
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, et al. "The emergence of status inequality in intermediate scale societies: A demographic and socio-economic history of the Keatley Creek site, British Columbia." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26.2 : 299–327.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, et al. "Evolution of a late prehistoric winter village on the interior plateau of British Columbia: geophysical investigations, radiocarbon dating, and spatial analysis of the Bridge River site." American antiquity : 59–81.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, Ian Kuijt, and James C. Chatters. Macroevolution in human prehistory: Evolutionary theory and processual archaeology. Springer, 2009.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, and David S. Clarke. "Lithic technological organization in an evolutionary framework: Examples from North America's Pacific Northwest region." Lithic Technology: Measures of Production, Use and Curation : 257–285.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie. "The Emergence of New Socioeconomic Strategies in the Middle and Late Holocene Pacific Northwest Region of North America." Macroevolution in Human Prehistory : 111–131.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, and Michael Lenert. "Cultural Stasis and Change in Northern North America: A Macroevolutionary Perspective." Macroevolution in Human Prehistory : 235–251.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, et al. "The Cultural Evolution of Material Wealth-Based Inequality at Bridge River, British Columbia." American Antiquity 77.3 : 542–564.
  • Prentiss, Anna Marie, et al. "At the Malthusian ceiling Subsistence and inequality at Bridge River British Columbia." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 33 : 34–48.

    Other projects

Several other subjects of study have involved Keatley Creek Site including :
  • Keatley Creek's general contribution to the study of human evolution and life in hunter-gatherer-fisher society
  • Household archaeology, the history of agriculture and evolution of agricultural economies, roots of social inequality
  • The demography of early households
  • Sediment characterization, activity areas identification, and the degree to which activities leave detectable chemical residues
  • The concept of house societies especially among hunter-gatherer-fishers
  • Mobility of household members
  • Prehistoric bone assemblages
  • Radiocarbon dating of Keatley Creek structures
  • Distribution of ethnographic cultures
  • Prehistoric socioeconomic status
  • The role of "combined paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses in studies of prehistoric social and economic organization"

    Keatley Creek housepit sites

The Keatley Creek winter village of housepits is geographically positioned near the Fraser River to "protect access to critical salmon resource." The area also provided the village access to a wide array of natural resources.

Basic structural concept

The housepits of Keatley Creek are semi-subterranean structures. Their construction was obviously labor-intensive and provided permanent structures in a generally circular shape with conical or pyramidal roof shapes. Entrance to the housepit was made possible by a log ladder that emerged through an opening located somewhat centrally in the roof protruding through the smoke hole. In general, each housepit affords only 2.5 square meters of floor space per person occupying the space.

Small housepit

Hayden's group tested Housepit 12 – one of the smaller housepits at the Keatley Creek site. It measured 9 meters in diameter where most small housepits are 7m in diameter. Compared to other small structures, housepit 12 had a substantial roof, indicating that these residents were not the poorest in the Keatley Creek community, but they were still impoverished compared to the residents of the larger structures at the site. There was little use of the fire hearth, foods required no cooking and were served unheated. It was essential for inhabitants to huddle for warmth. In this site, there was evidence of lower grade foods and clothing. There was very little storage space. The overall space was divided into distinct areas for butchering/eating, stonework and tools, open or communal areas. No distinct areas were reserved for lying down or sleeping, unlike peripheral areas of the larger housepits.

Medium housepit

Hayden's excavation included Housepit No. 3, which measured 14 meters in diameter. It is estimated that thirty people occupied this structure. Deposits here indicate some elements of wealth, larger storage pits, some higher grade food products, and probable access to better fishing sites than the residents of the smaller housepits. The wood used for fuel was the same type as for the small housepit, but here was evidence of greater use of fire and of the hearths. There were bedding materials at the peripheral walls with some raised sleeping platforms signifying another difference from the residents of the smaller structures. The medium-sized housepit included separate domestic spaces with a central communal area. The overall space was divided into four sectors with a principal hearth in central area.

Large housepit

The large housepit was especially important to Hayden's study of residential corporate groups and how the artifacts and assemblages could be used to compare the life practices of people living in the larger structures with those in the smaller size housepits. Hayden's team excavated Housepit #7 which measured 19 meters in diameter from rim crest to rim crest. They estimated that at least 45 people lived in this structure at one time—perhaps eight separate families or domestic units. The deposits found here indicated that these occupants enjoyed substantial economic resources and wealth compared to the residents of small structures. Higher grade construction materials and processes were employed. There were multiple hearths used regularly, some of them unusually large. Per capita storage areas were far larger and more numerous than those of other housepits. High quality foods were available including more meat products and some unexpected species. These occupants had access to a wide array of wealth items. Overall, they were economically well off. It is possible that they even had dogs as pets. Separate domestic units in the large housepit each contained hearths, tools, comforts, and conveniences. The structure held a central communal area with an especially large hearth. The division of the overall space indicates the possibility of sexual division of workspaces and for a "fundamental socioeconomic division" within the structure – perhaps including controlling families and tenant families or those who worked for the household. It is possible that some members of this household held high status in the community at large. Evidence indicates that the major housepits were continuously occupied over several generations, perhaps more than 1,000 years, by "a single, identifiable social group" which maintained the structure's roof, storage areas, and basic organization. It is remarkable that these households were able to successfully replenish themselves by recruiting new members over such a long period.

Other structures

Of the 119 housepits noted at Keatley Creek, some were apparently used as storage facilities of varying sizes. Also evident are communal roasting pits outside of the residential structures.

Debate about occupation and abandonment

Some controversy surrounds the dates of Keatley Creek's occupation and the reason for its depopulation. The debate is frustrated partly by the margin of error associated with radiocarbon dating. What is agreed by all researchers is that long before contact and colonization the large villages had disappeared—although the local area was never abandoned by indigenous peoples and, before contact and colonization, the indigenous population rose again. As the villages in the mid-Fraser Canyon contained one of the highest population densities in the Pacific Northwest, their breakup must have had significant repercussions for social life throughout the entire region. In identifying the exact reason, or reasons, for that change there is less consensus.
To be sure, not all researchers agree the site was continuously inhabited, nor do they agree on how or why the social communities came together. Two main proposals have been formulated: Hayden emphasizes technological development, and Prentiss' emphasizes environmental factors and limitations.

Early occupancy and catastrophe

Hayden places Keatley Creek's occupancy as beginning in 2,600 BP and ending in 1,000 BP. The villages came together at a moment which allowed for technological improvements to allow for the production of food surpluses through salmon harvest, and with the development of competitive feasting, social inequality emerged.
The villages were long-lived until a serious problem with the salmon population arose, leading to abandonment in 1000 AD. This is when a single catastrophic event — a massive rockslide below Lillooet at Texas Creek — destroyed salmon runs in the Fraser and creating a sudden crisis for Keatley Creek residents. The slide would have created a long-lasting dam for salmon, preventing access to necessary spawning beds.
The exact date of the Texas Creek slide is unclear, as is evidence of a large backed-up lake. These and other problems have been cited with Hayden's thesis.

Waves of population growth reach limits

Prentiss, on the other hand, estimates that occupancy was from 1,700 BP to 800 BP . Significant climatic warming was taking place during the initial period of village formation, increasing vegetation and likely decreasing the salmon population. Small village formation was driven by resource scarcity and a need to come together to conserve the salmon resources. A complex process of cultural transmission associated with population expansion took place later, when the climate shifted to be more favorable for salmon. Later, depopulation took place in two waves, around 800 BP associated with climatic deterioration during the Medieval warm period or the "early Neoglacial period." Stress on these communities was probably exacerbated by resource exhaustion of local roots and tubers. Dietary records suggest that people searched for food further afield from the villages and had more reliance on lower-quality food such as seeds. The complexity of hunting tools indicated that more diverse species of animals also were hunted further afield. This adds up to a "Malthusian ceiling" associated with reduction in critical subsistence resources, social change, and eventual village abandonment.

War, plague, crisis

Morin, who published radiocarbon dates of material at the house pits sites, concluded that the highest population densities were between 1,550–1,150 BP with a maximum around 1,200 BP. He argues that Keatley Creek's drastic population decline began in the ninth century. By 950 BP the Keatley Creek Site's population was barely half that of three centuries before. Also skeptical of a single catastrophic crisis, Morin also looks at internal contradictions in Mid-Fraser society. Although little evidence exists for warfare, it may have increased with the introduction of the bow and arrow, as elsewhere in the interior plains. Morin and others have suggested as well that variability in salmon populations could have been coupled with the reality that more densely settled population is vulnerable to disease.
Perhaps summarizing the common ground in the discussion, Morin and others have written:

Rather than a static, timeless picture of the aboriginal past, research in the Mid-Fraser offers a glimpse of the rich history of these peoples and their settlements . Briefly, this history included the development of many large villages with population densities along the Mid-Fraser greatly exceeding those at contact or even today and the abandonment of such settlements at least six centuries before contact. The history of these communities was undoubtedly marked by the founding of new villages; the rise and fall of powerful lineages and chiefs; the shifting of alliances between chiefs, lineages, villages, and distant trading partners; the spread of new technologies and rituals; periods of strife and peace; and others of plenty and dearth. Although archaeology can illuminate no more than an outline of this rich and varied history, researchers will continue to question current understandings of and add information about the long and extraordinary human past of this remarkable region.

Heritage resource classification

The significance of Keatley Creek's cultural heritage is especially true for local First Nations peoples, who have striven to overcome over a century of colonial policies aimed at forms of cultural destruction and genocide, and to reclaim their history, language and identities, as well as sovereignty and self-determination.
Since Keatley Creek was home to a large community for an extremely long time, it is extremely important for archaeological study, representing the culmination of centuries of human experimentation with housepit living. The site contributes to the bank of knowledge regarding North American history and communities. It suggests a past that was more socioeconomically or politically complex and more culturally diverse than previously recorded. Today the site is also recognized as a special heritage resource for the province of British Columbia.
Keatley Creek has also been described as "a world heritage quality site." It earned this distinction not only because its excavation is important for understanding the development of complex hunting and gathering cultures but also because it is well preserved, clearly visible, and easily accessed from a nearby highway. The Keatley Creek Site includes well-defined architectural features and provides valuable evidence of complex socioeconomic organization. Recently, the site has earned attention at a UNESCO conference hosted as part of its 2013 World Heritage Thematic Programme, at Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Mexico City.

Selected resources

Books and monographs

  • People of the Middle Fraser Canyon: An Archaeological History 2012
  • Ancient past of Keatley Creek.. 2000.
  • The pithouses of Keatley Creek: Complex hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Plateau. 1997
  • Pathways to power: principles for creating socioeconomic inequalities. Foundations of social inequality. 1995
  • "Evaluating lithic strategies and design criteria." Stone tools: Theoretical insights into human prehistory 1996

    Papers

  • "Identification of activity areas by multi-element characterization of sediments from modern and archaeological house floors using inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy".. 1996.
  • "Imagining the archaic".. 2008.
  • "Introduction: Considering the Middle Fraser.". 2008.
  • "Keatley Creek site and corporate group archaeology, The".. 1993.
  • "Prehistory: introduction." .1998.
  • "Reconstructing prehistoric socioeconomies from paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological data: an example from the British Columbia Plateau".. 1996.
  • "Role of bone density in structuring prehistoric salmon bone assemblages, The".. 1994.
  • "Thinking about household archaeology on the Northwest Coast.". 2006.
  • "Winter village pattern on the Plateau of Northwestern North America, The".. 2012.