Cultural Change and Continuity across the Late PreColonial and Early Colonial Periods in the Bridge River Valley: Archaeology of the S7istken Site Lisa Michelle Smith The winter housepit villages of the Middle Fraser region of British Columbia were among the largest aggregated settlements in North Americaâs Pacific Northwest. Many of these sites were occupied intermittently for over two millennia, and despite decades of research and countless publi cations describing aboriginal lifeways during the more ancient past, little is known about the socioeconomic structures that persisted during the late preColonial and Colonial periods. Ongoing research is beginning to shed light on cultural patterns that occurred during the Fur Trade period of the early to mid-nineteenth century (Carlson 2006). Interesting findings have emerged from these investigations, including evidence for continuation of aboriginal technologies despite long-lasting direct and indirect influence of Europeans, EuroCanadians, and EuroAmericans through the market economy. As much as they have contributed to our understanding of MidFraser history, in these studies Colonial period occupations are investigated in isolation from those that took place immediately beforehand. Thus, there is no sense of how preexisting conditions may have contributed to the ways in which the colonial experience played out. Lightfoot (1995) argues that archaeologists need to remove the artificial divide of prehistory and history in order to view European and Native American contact as part of a larger historical continuum. Unfortunately, little is known about the late preColonial period in the MidFraser region, making it difficult to generate this type of expansive cultural narrative. In this study I begin to fill some of the gaps in the Mid-Fraser interpretive narrative by evalu ating cultural change and continuity across the late preColonial and Colonial periods. Research of the late preColonial period focuses on Housepit 1 of the S7istken site, a winter pithouse village located in Bridge River Canyon just beyond the presentday town of Lillooet, British Columbia. From there the study expands into the Fur Trade period and incorporates data from Housepit 54 of the Bridge River site (Smith 2014). Ultimately, findings from Housepit 1 serve as baseline data from which to measure changes that occurred in Housepit 54 during the Fur Trade period. Assuming that Housepits 1 and 54 are normative representations of households during their respective time periods (which they may not be), findings may serve as a proxy for evolving cultural patterns during the late preColonial and Colonial periods in the Mid-Fraser beyond the two study sites. With that in mind, I make the argument that traditional subsistence, organized around collectorbased strategies, remained relatively unchanged across the two periods (see also Carlson 2006). Further, I argue that the exchange economy persisted through time, though it became amplified during the Fur Trade period, causing household production to become more structured around manufacture of trade goods (Fisher 1992). Resource control 227 Cultural Change and Continuity in the Bridge River Valley was consolidated as a consequence, and hunting became less localized after surrounding ungulate populations were overhunted due to buckskin production. Finally, I argue that the fur trade resulted in easier access to prestige items used for social signaling, marking changes in values in terms of material goods. Emergence of Aggregated Winter Settlements in the Middle Fraser Region of the Northern Plateau The MidFraser region of British Columbia is a dramatic landscape marked by alpine tundra environments distributed across high mountain peaks, ponderosa pine forests and bunchgrass environments at midelevations, and deeply incised river canyons below (Alexander 1992). Ice sheets covering the North American continent receded at the end of the Pleistocene more than 10,000 years ago, forming this landscape. Terraces were carved along steep canyon walls, eventually becoming surrounded by bountiful river and forest environments. By approximately 3500 cal. BP, the hunting and gathering ancestors of the Stâátâimc people had established their first winter pithouses in the area. Shortly thereafter they developed a delayed subsistence economy based on anadromous salmon and geophytes. Over the next few millennia the villages continued to grow in population and size, and throughout that time it appears that households were relatively egalitarian, with similar access to important raw materials and food resources (Prentiss et al. 2012). This trend continued even after 2400 cal. BP as communities began to participate in regional trade networks that moved food and material items throughout the Pacific Northwest (Hayden and Schulting 1997; Morin 2012). © 2017 by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.
