In The Last House at Bridge River, Anna Marie Prentiss and colleagues present archaeological research on Indigenous life at the Bridge River site, located in the Middle Fraser Canyon in the St'át’imc (Upper Lillooet) homeland on British Columbia's Fraser Plateau during the English fur trade period in western Canada. The Salish-speaking St'át’imc traditionally practiced a foraging subsistence strategy incorporating diverse foods, including deer, salmon, berries, and roots. They wintered in villages with semi-subterranean pithouses, each typically occupied by a multifamily group. The Bridge River site contains 80 housepit features with precolonial occupations dating as early as 1800 cal BP.
Only one house feature—Housepit 54 (HP54)—also contains deposits and materials dating to the postcontact period. This remarkable housepit has 17 occupation floors, 16 of which predate 1000 cal BP. The uppermost floor of HP54 dates to the Mid-Fraser fur trade period, around AD 1830s–1850s, and it is the only archaeologically known housepit in the Mid-Fraser region with a postcontact period occupation. In 2012, as part of a collaboration between the University of Montana and Bridge River Indian Band, Prentiss directed the excavation of HP54 fur trade period (HP54FTP) deposits. The project aimed to investigate St'át’imc daily life, including socioeconomic and political organization, during the fur trade era, with particular attention to continuity and change during this period. The Last House at Bridge River brings together resulting analyses in 13 chapters by 25 authors.
The first three chapters introduce the book. In Chapter 1, Prentiss provides the archaeological and ethnohistorical context of the HP54FTP project, highlighting its importance as the first substantial archaeological investigation of colonial-era St'át’imc socioeconomic and political organization. Additional context is presented by Matthew Walsh in Chapter 2 with an overview of Mid-Fraser historical ecology, and by Prentiss in Chapter 3 with a summary of archaeological field methods and site structure. Chapters 4–12 explore continuity and change in St'át’imc socioeconomic and political life during the fur trade period through analyses of specific classes of HP54 material remains. These include analyses of lithics (Chapters 4 and 5), Euro-American manufactures (Chapter 6), faunal remains (Chapter 7), plant remains (Chapter 8), and housepit spatial organization (Chapters 9–11) and a comparison of the HP54FTP deposits with late precontact period housepit deposits from the nearby S7istken site (Chapter 12).
In Chapter 13, Prentiss synthesizes the results of previous chapters into a model of HP54FTP household organization, and St'át’imc socioeconomic and political organization more broadly, during the fur trade period. This synthesis suggests that the HP54FTP household was relatively egalitarian, with some segregation of residential space by gender and age and a communal socioeconomic system. Multiple lines of evidence indicate changes, including the intensification of deer hunting, deer hide production, and exchange with interior groups in relation to the fur trade. Rather than marked transformations, these changes constitute shifts within the context of long-standing aboriginal cultural practices and values, pointing to St'át’imc cultural persistence facilitated by intergenerational knowledge transmission in the context of the fur trade.
The Last House at Bridge River makes important contributions to Mid-Fraser archaeology, enabling more accurate, nuanced, and multivocal understandings of aboriginal society, culture, and daily life in the context of colonialism in this area. It is relevant to the archaeology of complexity in the Mid-Fraser and the broader Pacific Northwest, expanding our knowledge of long-term sociopolitical trajectories in these regions. The Last House at Bridge River is also a valuable addition to the archaeology of Indigenous peoples in colonial contexts generally. It demonstrates a range of methodological and theoretical approaches, and it presents a set of inferences that can be applied or evaluated in other studies of Indigenous communities in colonial contexts across North America and beyond.
The Last House at Bridge River is highly readable. The chapters are generally well written and should be accessible not only to scholars but also to a general audience. Tables, maps, graphs, photographs, and illustrations communicate large amounts of information clearly. Several chapters include excellent syntheses of previous archaeological and ethnohistorical research in the Mid-Fraser region and thus are useful as references and stand-alone studies.
