The Housepit 54 Project at Bridge River, British Columbia: Archaeological Perspectives on Demography, Cultural Inheritance, and Household History

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

The Bridge River Archaeological Project is a long-term research partnership between The University of Montana, Department of Anthropology and Xwisten, the Bridge River Indian Band. The project seeks to understand the long-term history of the Bridge River housepit village with a focus on demographic change, technological evolution, socio-economic variability, and household sociality. This research permits us to develop studies that impact discipline-wide discussions of the evolution and organization of complex forager-fisher communities. The current phase, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, focuses on Housepit 54, deeply stratified house feature at the north end of the village. With at least 14 anthropogenic floors dating ca. 1100 to 1450 cal. B.P. and excellent preservation of faunal and macrobotanical remains, Housepit 54 provides us with the remarkable opportunity to examine persistence and change in household traditions on an intergenerational basis. This poster session presents results of ongoing research developing from our 2012 through 2014 field seasons. Presentations examine dating and stratigraphy, cultural inheritance, demography, food collection and processing, technological traditions, social relationships, and approaches to artistic interpretation.

Other Keywords
Household Archaeology • Geoarchaeology • Bridge River Site • complex hunter-gatherers • demography • Subsistence • Groundstone • Lithic Raw Material • Zooarchaeology • Activity Areas

Geographic Keywords
North America-Canada • North America - NW Coast/Alaska • North American - Basin Plateau

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)
Documents
  1. The Ancient Floors of Housepit 54, Bridge River site: Stratigraphy and Dating (2015)
  2. Continuity and Change Between Late Prehistoric and Early Historic Periods: Visually Reconstructing Two Successive Occupations of Housepit 54 at the Bridge River Village Site, Mid-Fraser Region, British Columbia, Canada (2015)
  3. A Demographic History of Housepit 54, Bridge River site, British Columbia (2015)
  4. Dog coprolites as a source of dietary and genetic information at the Bridge River Site, BC (2015)
  5. The Dogs of Housepit 54: A Taphonomic Analysis of Recovered Canine Remains at Bridge River, British Columbia (2015)
  6. The Groundstone Artifacts of Housepit 54, Bridge River Site, British Columbia (2015)
  7. Household Hearth-Centered Activity Areas at the Bridge River Site, British Columbia: Formation Processes and Site Structure (2015)
  8. Housepit 54 through an Indigenous Framework: A Holistic Interpretation of an Ancient Traditional Home (2015)
  9. Linking Geochemistry and Geology in Interpreting Anthropogenic Sediments at Bridge River, British Columbia (2015)
  10. Lithic Raw Materials Procurement and Exchange at Housepit 54, Bridge River Site, British Columbia: What a Diachronic Perspective Reveals (2015)
  11. One Group or Many? Cultural Inheritance at Housepit 54, Bridge River Site, British Columbia (2015)
  12. Plant use practices of an ancient St’át’imc household, Bridge River, British Columbia (2015)
  13. Variation in Animal Predation and Processing Strategies at the Bridge River Winter Pithouse Village (EeRl4) Thru Time: A Zooarchaeological Analysis of Subsistence Change (2015)
  14. Variation in the Lithic Technological Organization Accompanying Household Expansion at Housepit 54, Bridge River site, British Columbia (2015)