With National Science Foundation support, Dr. William C. Prentiss and his colleagues will conduct two field seasons of archaeological research at the Bridge River site, a large housepit village located in the Middle Fraser Canyon of south-central British Columbia. Like the nearby Keatley Creek site, Bridge River offers extensive (70 housepits) and well-preserved archaeological deposits representing a globally significant record of complex hunter-gatherer evolution and village organization. Most importantly, this site provides direct evidence for documenting transitions between socio-economically egalitarian and ranked hunter-gatherer societies. Dr. Prentiss will direct multidisciplinary research that will examine this evolutionary process relying upon geophysical investigations, surface contour mapping, archaeological excavation, radiocarbon dating, and zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical analyses. Geophysical research will employ a wide range of instruments (including magnetometry, conductivity, resistivity, and ground-penetrating radar) in order to produce a sub-surface map of features across the village. Laser-transit mapping will provide a detailed surface contour map. These studies will permit a broad assessment of variability in house-floors, hearths and roasting pits, storage structures, and possibly a village palisade. Archaeological test excavations will be placed in contexts indicative of cooking or heating features with the goal of collecting samples that will permit radiocarbon dating of all house floors and a sample of external features. Feature function, and, by proxy, variation in household subsistence and technological behavior will be examined through detailed studies of artifacts and faunal and floral remains.
Dr. Prentiss and his colleagues will focus on several key questions: 1. When did the Bridge River village emerge as an aggregated community? 2. When did socio-economic inequality emerge? 3. What are the ecological, technological, and demographic correlates of this process? 4. Can we understand social evolution of this nature as a process that occurs under regionally optimal resource conditions or is it driven by declining access to key resources making for greater competition to control the most productive foraging landscapes. The research will offer implications of substantial intellectual merit, addressing the emergence of socio-economic inequality in aggregated hunter-gatherer communities. It asks whether inequality is the consequence of self-interested behavior of aspiring elites when resources are abundant or if it is one possible result of a cultural evolutionary process associated with high populations and declining access to resources. The project will result in broad impacts on several levels. It will directly incorporate indigenous communities in the research process thereby enhancing archaeologist and Native American/First Nations relationships. It will offer science educational opportunities to university students and the general public. It will offer insight into relationships between human behavior and ecological change during earlier periods of global warming. This is expected to have eventual impacts on human, cultural, and natural resource management policies and practices within the broader region.
