Keatley Creek is a significant archaeological site in the interior of British Columbia and is located in the traditional territory of the St'at'imc. The site is near the town of Lillooet, on a benchland flanking Keatley Creek. The site holds the remnants of multiple prehistoric, semi-subterranean wooden dwellings (pit-houses), and is one of the largest and most-studied pit-house village sites in Canada, with some of the widest pit-house depressions (house pits) in the archaeological record. It is believed that the site was inhabited as early as 6000 BCE (8000 BP).
The site was once a large, complex community, and around 4800 BCE (6850 BP), it developed an economy centred around gathering, fishing, and hunting. The Keatley Creek site flourished around 400 BCE (2425 BP) with a maximum population of about 1000. At that time, the network of villages in the Mid-Fraser region would have been one of the largest pre-contact aboriginal communities within 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 the 11th century (1000 BP) or as late as the 13th century (800 BP), as were the neighbouring villages. No decisive evidence has been found of either warfare or a deadly epidemic causing this decline. It is possible that environmental catastrophe or climate change caused or contributed to the village's abandonment.
Keatley Creek is of special importance to the cultural heritage of First Nations communities. It is a provincially recognized cultural heritage area and has attracted international attention at a UNESCO research forum.
Location The Keatley Creek site (Borden Number ) is an archaeological excavation site in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and is 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 Plateau of the Interior Pacific Northwest), about 25 km upstream on the Fraser River from Lillooet, the closest town. It lies within the Glen Fraser ranchlands in what is called the Middle Fraser Canyon or "Mid-Fraser", between the St'at'imc communities of Xaxlip (Fountain) and Ts'kwaylacw (Pavilion).
Keatley Creek is "...nestled in a small basin at the back edge of a Pleistocene river terrace, where [the terrace] meets the mountain slope, over 1200 ft. (360 m) above the Fraser River" on terrain described as "benchlands above the [...] gorge". The village was close to many other small and medium communities including the downriver villages of Seton Lake , Lillooet, Bridge River , Fountain, and Bell , as well as the upriver villages of Pavilion, McKay Creek and , Chicken Gully , Kelly Creek (or Pełtêqet) and , and Cavanaugh Creek (or Łenłan'iten) . Several of these villages (including Lillooet, Fountain, and Pavilion) have now been destroyed. Of the remaining Plateau pithouse tradition village settlements in the Mid-Fraser region, only the Kelly Creek and Keatley Creek sites have more than one hundred depressions.
Site The site itself stretches over a kilometre, with the core area with the greatest concentration of house pits covering in a four hectare radius. The site supported a long period of human occupation, and was one of the largest villages in the Mid-Fraser region. Carbon dating puts initial occupation at around 8000–7000 BP. The site was more or less consistently occupied from the Shuswap horizon (4000–2400 BP) through the Plateau horizon (2400–1200 BP) and into the early Kamloops horizon (from 1200 BP).
The site features include 119 depressions, called house pits or quiggly holes. Keatley Creek is "known for the unusually large size of its semisubterranean houses", some more than 20 metres in diameter, although many are no larger than 5 metres. Preliminary investigation by Lepofsky et al. has indicated that the Keatley Creek area was occupied by "residential corporate groups of differing economic and social status."
Village life At its peak ( 1250 BP), Keatley Creek's population numbered over 700 and probably around 1000. This so-called zenith is known as the Classic Lillooet Phase, where the villages existed in some form of network—either relatively autonomously or as multi-village communities. Tools, baskets, and hunting weapons found in excavations at 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. The house-pit village in some ways lends itself to the creation of a material history, as Anna 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 pit-house formation. At Keatley Creek, houses generally consist of the final inhabitant's floor; previous floors and roofs have been 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 (such as the Middle Jōmon culture of Japan, the northern European Mesolithic, the Natufian of the Near East, and the Thule tradition of North America's Western Arctic). At the same time, the pit-house 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, and 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 [...]. 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 (plants, geophytes or roots and tubers, and berries), supplemented by deer, salmon was also a key source of nutrients. Trade and exchange for dried salmon also brought together goods from considerable distances away, such as ground stone bowls, obsidian, and nephrite jade. Chinook, sockeye, 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, probably because of their stronger, richer flavour, although they take longer to dry. Salmon DNA studies show that during the period Keatley Creek was inhabited, pink salmon, a fish known to be easy to catch and to dry, were absent from the region. Climatic changes would have affected salmon populations, with growth during cooler periods and reduction during warmer periods.Palynology, alluvial stratigraphy, paleo-oceanography, and studies of pre-history now show that the regional climate (and likely also the seasonal round) significantly alternated, with a dry interval (2200 to 1600 BP) followed by a cool, moist interval (1600 to 1200 BP) and then a return to drier conditions, corresponding with the Medieval Warm Period.
Social organization The presence of somewhat unequal pit-house sizes, storage pits, and differences in the type and quality of dietary and lithic (stone tool) remains make Keatley Creek an important archaeological site in debates about the development of social inequality.
Initial research indicated that "mass harvest and storage permitted sedentism and inequality in natural abundances led to social inequalities." Winter survival relied on extensive use of food storage, which became more important 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.