Complex Fisher-Foragers of the Interior Pacific Northwest: The Housepit 54 Project at Bridge River, British Columbia

The Bridge River site is a complex fisher-forager village most intensively occupied between 1000 and 2000 years ago. Previous research suggests that it grew to maximum size of at least 30 co-occupied housepits with a population estimated to be 800-1000 persons by ca. 1250-1300 cal. B.P. After this time the village declined in size and was eventually abandoned for several hundred years. During the centuries immediately prior to abandonment the village was reorganized spatially and developed evidence for inter-household inequality. The Housepit 54 project at Bridge River was developed to gain an understanding of household history during the period of rapid village growth and decline. The final season of excavations in 2016 confirmed a stratigraphic sequence of 17 anthropogenic floors and approximately six periods of house expansion. Interdisciplinary research is focused on examining social and economic factors associated with household history along with a host of tangential interests including breeding and consumption of domesticated dogs. Posters in this symposium explore house pit stratigraphy, dating, cultural inheritance, lithic technological organization, subsistence (zooarchaeology, paleoethnobotany. and isotope studies), canid phylogeny using ancient DNA, geochemical signals in floors and lithic raw materials, spatial distributions, and public interpretation of indigenous cultural heritage.