Household Archaeology at the Bridge River Site (EeRl4), British Columbia: Spatial Distributions of Features, Lithic Artifacts, and Faunal Remains on Fifteen Anthropogenic Floors from Housepit 54
Household Archaeology at the Bridge River Site (EeRl4), British Columbia: Spatial Distributions of Features, Lithic Artifacts, and Faunal Remains on Fifteen Anthropogenic Floors from Housepit 54
by Anna Marie Prentiss, Ethan Ryan, Ashley Hampton, Kathryn Bobolinski, Pei-Lin Yu, Matthew Schmader and Alysha Edwards
University of Utah Press, 2022 Cloth: 978-1-64769-051-9 | eISBN: 978-1-64769-052-6 Library of Congress Classification E78.B9 Dewey Decimal Classification 971.131
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Household Archaeology at Bridge River offers a unique contribution to the study of household archaeology, providing unprecedented insights into the history of a long-lived house in the Interior Pacific Northwest. With fifteen intact anthropogenic floors dating to pre-Colonial times, Bridge River’s Housepit 54 provides an extraordinary archaeological record—the first to allow researchers to adequately test for relationships between occupational variation and social change.
The authors take a methodological approach that integrates the study of household spatial organization with consideration of archaeological formation processes. Repeating the same set of analyses for each floor, they examine stability from standpoints of occupation and abandonment cycles, structure and organization of activity areas, and variation in positioning of wealth-related items. This volume is an outstanding example of research undertaken through a collaborative partnership between scholars from the University of Montana and the community of the St’át’imc Nation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Anna Marie Prentiss is Regents Professor of Anthropology at the University of Montana. She is editor of The Last House at Bridge River and author of Field Seasons, and People of the Middle Fraser Canyon, and editor of Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology.
REVIEWS
“A significant contribution to analytical methods in household archaeology. There are relatively few studies that can examine changes in the use of a single house structure over this much time. The careful hypothesis-testing using traditional knowledge as a frame of reference makes this study a model for others in this field.”
—Amber Johnson, Truman State University
“The longevity and complexity of pithouse occupations at Bridge River—and potentially at other sites nearby—are profoundly interesting findings, and the balance evident in the Fraser River Valley between tendencies towards hierarchy/inequality and egalitarianism/communality is fascinating. These topics and sophisticated insights from this book are of great interest to global conversations in archaeology.”
—Christopher B. Rodning, Tulane University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
1. Housepit Floor Formation Processes, Activity Areas, and Sociality: The Record from Housepit 54
2. The Final Floor: Stratum IIa
3. Final Wealth-Based Distinctions: Stratum IIb
4. Persistence during the Second Demographic Trough: Stratum IIc
5. Social Complexity Continues: Stratum IId
6. The Demographic Peak and the Emergence of Social Complexity: Stratum IIe
7. A Crowded House: Stratum IIf
8. The Collectivist House Strategy: Stratum IIg
9. The Final Communalist House: Stratum IIh
10. Survival During the First Demographic Low: Stratum IIi
11. Short Winter Occupation Cycles: Stratum IIj
12. Large Scale Storage and Hints of a Shorter Winter Cycle: Stratum IIk
13. The First Rectangular House: Stratum IIl
14. The Last Small House: Stratum IIm
15. The Second Small House: Stratum IIn
16. Housepit 54 Begins: Stratum IIo
17. Conclusions
References
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.