The world's longest-lived corporate group: analysis reveals prehistoric social organization near Lillooet, British Columbia

The ability to identify distinct types of cherts and chalcedonies at the large prehistoric housepit site of Keatley Creek on the British Columbia plateau has made it possible to infer important aspects of socioeconomic organization from ca. 2400 to 1100 B.P. Each large housepit tested at the site appears to have a distinctive and characteristic composition of chert and chalcedony debitage which remains coherent over time (for at least 1,000 years). Three inferences concerning socioeconomic organization are derived from these observations: (1) residents of each large housepit probably foraged in distinctly different ranges during nonwinter months where they procured their raw stone materials; (2) residents of each large pithouse formed 'residential corporate groups' that differed in their access to stone resources; and (3) the 'residential corporate groups' that occupied large pithouses retained economic rights, corporate identity, and ownership of specific pithouse premises for unusually long time periods spanning more than a millennium. Differences between lithic assemblages of housepits were confirmed by three separate and independent analyses employing successively more sophisticated techniques.
This article presents a brief summary of the analyses from the excavation program at the Keatley Creek site in British Columbia. We use lithic raw material data to confirm the [...]