Timeline in stone| Lithic indications of social and economic change at Housepit 7 of the Keatley Creek Site

The Keatley Creek site is a large, winter housepit village located on the Canadian Plateau in British Columbia, Canada.Past research and more recent excavations conducted by the University of Montana in 1999Montana in ,2001Montana in , and 2002 have focused on Housepit 7, one of the largest housepit features within the village core.Two models have been developed that attempt to explain the emergence of large, aggregated villages like Keatley Creek.The more established aggrandizer model suggests that such villages, with their attendant socioeconomic complexity, emerged as a result of a strong, sustained focus on plentiful and highly predictable salmon runs in the Mid-Fraser River.Individuals desiring elevated status and power manipulated surplus salmon for their benefit, which resulted in the early rise of inequality and ranking on the individual and household levels, as well as differential access to resources.These hallmarks of complexity arose during the late Shuswap Horizon (ca.3500-2400B.P.) and remained stable until the abandonment of the village.A second, alternative model asserts that the changing environment played a more active role in the evolution of cultural structures and subsequent emergence of socioeconomic complexity at Keatley Creek.Building upon an earlier established foundation, socioeconomic complexity did not fully develop until the early Kamloops Horizon (ca.1200-200 B.P.), and under drought conditions.Local resource shortages, intense competition, and the use of new technologies resulted in pronounced inequality, ranking, and differential access to resources late at the Keatley Creek site.This model is dynamic, and suggests people responded directly to changing environmental conditions.In order to test these two propositions, this research analyzes lithic artifacts and raw materials excavated from Housepit 7 of the Keatley Creek site by the University of Montana.Lithic technology is placed within organizational and functional frameworks, and plotted along a new Housepit 7 timeline that spans the period of approximately 1815 B.P. to village abandonment at 800 B.P. These organizational and functional lithic data demonstrate that logistical mobility increased over time as subsistence shifted to a stronger focus on terrestrial resources, patterns of which peaked during the latest occupation phases of Housepit 7. Prestige-associated lithic raw material and prestige item fi-equencies and diversity are also greatest late in the life of the house.These implications of lithic use and discard meet those predicted under the alternative, evolutionary model of emergent socioeconomic complexity V Keatley Creek and the stability of the pattern throughout the life of the village.Continual, strong reliance on salmon was the rule as aggrandizers used surpluses of the abundant resource to build-up their power-base and status.In the second, alternative model, socioeconomic complexity developed over three phases at Keatley Creek.Under this "evolutionary" model, groups with a reliance on aquatic resources packed into the Mid-Fraser area in order to access substantial salmon runs that remained plentiful there, but were reduced in numbers elsewhere on the Plateau due to drought conditions (Prentiss et al. 2004).This process occurred twice at 1800-1500 B.P. and 1100-700 B P., which coincides with two periods of drought separated by a brief interval of cooler and wetter climate conditions ( Prentisset al. 2004).When drought conditions took hold for the second time, the initial aggregation provided the adaptive structure for a new cultural mechanism to develop.Within the context of substantial local resource shortages, increased territoriality, and new technologies, significant individual and household competition occurred (Prentiss et al. 2004).The end result was characterized by all the elements of Hayden's (1997, 2000b) Classic Lillooet period at Keatley Creek.The key element of the evolutionary model is the late rise of socioeconomic complexity at Keatley Creek, which peaked between 1100-700 B.P. just prior to abandonment of the village.It is also more dynamic, and does not involve the stability of adaptation described by Hayden's (1997) model.This research tests both the aggrandizer and evolutionary models with recently excavated lithic data from Housepit 7.These data are considered within the framework of the housepit's timeline, as derived from recently published radiocarbon dates (Prentiss et al. 2003b).In so doing, patterns of lithic production, use, and discard are observable

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