At its peak ( 1250 BP), Keatley Creek's population numbered over 700 and probably around 1000. 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, the
Thule tradition of North America's Western Arctic, etc.). 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 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 [...]. 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.
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, 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. 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 (2200 to 1600 BP) followed by a cool, moist time (1600 to 1200 BP) and then a return to drier conditions, corresponding with the
Medieval Warm Period. These changes would have also affected salmon populations, with growth during the cooler, moist era and reduction during the warmer periods.
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. Three types of "
corporate group" 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 'neighbourhood' groups. 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 (e.g. 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-houses 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." 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" due to the overall prevalence of chinook salmon. Some archaeologists have also suggested that social stratification took place not during a time 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==