Keatley Creek Archaeological Site

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 caus

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).