Keatley Creek Archaeological Site

The Keatley Creek Site (Borden Number EeR17) 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. The site is situated on the British Columbia Plateau (also known as the Canadian Plateau) about 25 km upstream along the Fraser River[1] in what is called the Middle Fraser Canyon or "Mid-Fraser".[2] The site is between the St'at'imc communities of Xaxli'p (Fountain) and Ts'kw'aylaxw (Pavilion).[3] 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. (360 m) above the Fraser River"[4] on terrain described as "benchlands above the Fraser River gorge".[1]

The village was close to many other small and medium communities including the down-river villages of Seton Lake (EeRl-21), Lillooet, Bridge River (EeRl-4), Fountain and Bell (EeRk-4), as well as, upriver, Pavilion, McKay Creek (EfRl-3 and −13), Chicken Gully (EfRl-5), and Kelly Creek/Pełtêqet (EfRk 1 and EfRl 25). Several of these villages (including Lillooet, Fountain and Pavilion) 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 have more than one hundred depressions, although large villages (with over 130 depressions) 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,[5] where the villages existed in some form of network—either relatively autonomously or with multi-village communities.

The site itself stretches over a kilometer, with the core area with the greatest concentration of house pits covering in a four hectare radius.[1] The site supported a lengthy period of human occupation, and was one of the largest villages in the Mid-Fraser region.[6] Earliest carbon dating puts initial occupation around 7,000–8,000 BP. The site was more or less consistently occupied from the Shuswap horizon (2400–4000 BP) through the Plateau horizon (1200–2400 BP) and into the early Kamloops horizon (1200 BP).[6]

The site features include 119 house depressions,[1] called a house pits or quiggly holes (kekuli or kickwillie). Keatley Creek is "known for the unusually large size of its semi-subterranean houses"[6] some more than 20 meters in diameter, although many are no larger than 5 meters.[7] Archaeological investigation has concluded the Keatley Creek area was occupied by "residential corporate groups of differing economic and social status"[1] which can also be described as a transegalitarian community.

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 ("mountain potatoes") and mountain lilies, as well as hunt and fish in the mountain lakes (Alexander 1992). 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.[4]

Therefore, although a critical amount of nutrition came from gathered foods (plants, geophytes or roots and tubers, and berries) and deer also supplemented nutrition, salmon fishery was a key source of nutrients.[4] 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.[10] 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.[10]

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 (2,200 to 1,600 BP) followed by a cool, moist time (1,600 to 1,200 BP) 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.[9]

The presence of somewhat unequal pit house sizes, storage pits, as well as differences in the type and quality of dietary and lithic (stone tool) 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 sedentism and inequality in natural abundances led to social inequalities."[11] 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.[11]

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.[12] Studies indicate an early socioeconomic strategy[7] 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.[2] The biggest dwellings have the largest storage capacity, more prestige foods (i.e. chinook salmon) 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 (hides), weaving materials (hair), ritual, and food."[11]

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"[10] 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.[8] 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."[11]

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."[4] Hayden's group was also interested in the cultural continuity in the region[4] and exploring houses where multiple families lived in what were described as "residential corporate groups"[4] Hayden's expedition examined the botanical, faunal, and lithic remains at the site[13] 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 (waste products from manufacture).[13] The nature of each structure was examined in order to compare the "economic and social organization" of the residences.[1] 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 (1995): 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 (2005): 1378–1389.
• Hayden, Brian, Nora Franco, and Jim Spafford. "Evaluating lithic strategies and design criteria." Stone tools: Theoretical insights into human prehistory (1996): 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 (1996): 341–356.
• Hayden, Brian, and June M. Ryder. "Prehistoric cultural collapse in the Lillooet area." American Antiquity (1991): 50–65.
• Hayden, Brian, and Rick Schulting. "The plateau interaction sphere and late prehistoric cultural complexity." American antiquity (1997): 51–85.

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."[7] 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."[7] 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."[2] 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 (2007): 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 (2008): 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 (2008): 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 (2009): 111–131.
• Prentiss, Anna Marie, and Michael Lenert. "Cultural Stasis and Change in Northern North America: A Macroevolutionary Perspective." Macroevolution in Human Prehistory (2009): 235–251.
• Prentiss, Anna Marie, et al. "The Cultural Evolution of Material Wealth-Based Inequality at Bridge River, British Columbia." American Antiquity 77.3 (2012): 542–564.
• Prentiss, Anna Marie, et al. "At the Malthusian ceiling Subsistence and inequality at Bridge River British Columbia." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 33 (2014): 34–48.

Several other subjects of study have involved Keatley Creek Site including (but not limited to):

• Keatley Creek's general contribution to the study of human evolution and life in hunter-gatherer-fisher society[7]
• Household archaeology, the history of agriculture and evolution of agricultural economies, roots of social inequality[12]
• The demography of early households[12]
• Sediment characterization, activity areas identification, and the degree to which activities leave detectable chemical residues[6]
• The concept of house societies especially among hunter-gatherer-fishers[12]
• Mobility of household members[12]
• Prehistoric bone assemblages[14]
• Radiocarbon dating of Keatley Creek structures[15]
• Distribution of ethnographic cultures[7]
• Prehistoric socioeconomic status[1]
• The role of "combined paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses in studies of prehistoric social and economic organization"[1]

The housepits of Keatley Creek are semi-subterranean structures.[4] Their construction was obviously labor-intensive and provided permanent structures[7] in a generally circular shape with conical or pyramidal roof shapes.[1] Entrance to the housepit was made possible by a log ladder that emerged through an opening located somewhat centrally in the roof[1] protruding through the smoke hole.[4] In general, each housepit affords only 2.5 square meters of floor space per person[4] occupying the space.

Hayden's group tested Housepit 12 – one of the smaller housepits at the Keatley Creek site. It measured 9 meters in diameter (rim crest to rim crest) 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.[4] No distinct areas were reserved for lying down or sleeping, unlike peripheral areas of the larger housepits.[1]

Hayden's excavation included Housepit No. 3, which measured 14 meters in diameter. It is estimated that thirty people (i.e., five or six nuclear families) 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.[4] 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.[1] 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.[4]

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.[4] 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.[4] High quality foods were available including more meat products (such as fox, bear, and sheep) and some unexpected species (such as scallops which would have been obtained in trade from the coast).[1] 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.[4] 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.[4] It is possible that some members of this household held high status in the community at large.[1] 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.[1] It is remarkable that these households were able to successfully replenish themselves by recruiting new members over such a long period.[12]

Of the 119 housepits noted at Keatley Creek, some were apparently used as storage facilities of varying sizes (some quite large). Also evident are communal roasting pits outside of the residential structures.[7]

Hayden places Keatley Creek's occupancy as beginning in 2,600 BP and ending in 1,000 BP (ca 400 BC – 1000 AD).[4] 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.[15] 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.

Prentiss, on the other hand, estimates that occupancy was from 1,700 BP to 800 BP[2] (ca 300–1200 AD[15]). 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[7] (1200 AD[15]) associated with climatic deterioration during the Medieval warm period[15] 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.[7][8]

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 (400 AD and 800 AD) with a maximum around 1,200 BP (700 AD). He argues that Keatley Creek's drastic population decline began in the ninth century. By 950 BP (1000 AD) the Keatley Creek Site's population was barely half that of three centuries before.[15] 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.[5]

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 [like Keatley Creek]. 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.

• People of the Middle Fraser Canyon: An Archaeological History (Prentiss, Anna Marie and Ian Kuijt.) 2012
• Ancient past of Keatley Creek. (Hayden, Brian and Simon Fraser University). 2000.
• The pithouses of Keatley Creek: Complex hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Plateau (Hayden, Brian). 1997
• Pathways to power: principles for creating socioeconomic inequalities. Foundations of social inequality. (Hayden, Brian.) 1995
• "Evaluating lithic strategies and design criteria." Stone tools: Theoretical insights into human prehistory (Hayden, Brian, Nora Franco, and Jim Spafford.) 1996

• "Identification of activity areas by multi-element characterization of sediments from modern and archaeological house floors using inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy". (William D. Middleton and T. Douglas Price). 1996.
• "Imagining the archaic". (Anna Marie Prentiss). 2008.
• "Introduction: Considering the Middle Fraser." (Cole Harris). 2008.
• "Keatley Creek site and corporate group archaeology, The". (Brian Hayden and Jim Spafford). 1993.
• "Prehistory: introduction." (James C. Chatters and David L. Pokotylo).1998.
• "Reconstructing prehistoric socioeconomies from paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological data: an example from the British Columbia Plateau". (Kenneth P. Lertzman). 1996.
• "Role of bone density in structuring prehistoric salmon bone assemblages, The". (Virginia L. Butler and James C. Chatters). 1994.
• "Thinking about household archaeology on the Northwest Coast." (Kenneth M. Ames). 2006.
• "Winter village pattern on the Plateau of Northwestern North America, The". (Anna Marie Prentiss). 2012.