The Keatley Creek Site

       The Keatley Creek site is an unusually large prehistoric housepit village site located on the terraces of the Fraser River, about 20 km upstream from the town of Lillooet, British Columbia. Archaeological investigations were undertaken at the site by Dr. Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University between 1986 and 1996. The results of this research have provided a insight into the lives and times of early residents at Keatley Creek.

       The goal of the Fraser River Investigations into Corporate Group Archaeology Project was to understand the economic and social organization that made large villages and households possible prehistorically. In order to answer such questions, special attention had to be paid to formation processes and the nature of sediments encountered in housepit remains. Project results indicate that the 'Classic Lillooet' villages were exceptionally well situated to obtain and trade large numbers of salmon of prime quality for drying and preservation. Evidence of trade with the coast is abundant at the site, as well as evidence for ownership of resources, wealth, accumulation, and hierarchial socioeconomic organization. On the basis of the analysis of fish remains at the site, it appears that large households probably owned or restricted access to some of the most lucrative fishing and hunting areas.

       Initial occupations at Keatley Creek occured during the Middle Prehistoric period (7,000 to 4,800 years before present). Microblades as well as both Lehman and Lochnore type projectile points occur in localized areas beneath housepit rim middens; however, excavated areas are extremely limited and at present there is no clear indication of any housepit structures from this time period. The first definite housepits appear to have been constructed during the Shuswap horizon (4,800 to 2,400 BP) since many housepit middens have exclusively Shuswap style projectile points in their bottom levels. However, it appears to be during the Plateau (2,400 to 1,200 BP) and the early Kamloops (1,200 to 1,000 BP) horizons that the site was most extensively occupied. Over 115 house sized depressions at the site date to these time periods. The largest of these house depressions range from 18 - 21 meters in diameter, and constitute some of the largest constructions known from the British Columbia Interior, and from western Canada.

       The core area of the site is about 4 hectares, although sporadic occurrences of houses and features occur for almost a kilometer along the terrace. The Keatley Creek site is the largest remaining site of a series of unusually large prehistoric housepit villages in the vicinity of Lillooet that include the Bell site and the Bridge River site. Still others have been destroyed.

       All of the large Classic Lillooet sites appear to have been abandoned about 1,100 years BP. It has been suggested that this was most likely due to a major landslide on the Fraser River that may have blocked salmon runs for years or decades and thereby destroyed the subsistence and trade economy of the remarkable Lillooet communities.

       Based on the undisturbed nature of rim middens and some datable interior storage pits, the large housepits such as Housepit 7 appear to have attained their maximum dimensions by at least the Plateau horizon, and may well have been close to their maximim size even in Shuswap horizon times.