Classic Lillooet (St'át'imc) — Keatley Creek (EeRl 7)

From the Keatley Creek pithouse village on the terraces above the Mid-Fraser Canyon — one of the largest prehistoric villages of the British Columbia Interior, in St'át'imc (Lillooet) territory — excavators recovered a worked bone object that Brian Hayden identified as a probable bullroarer. Hayden lists it among the village's "unique or extremely rare items," a bone artifact for which, he argues, the strongest case can be made that it was a prestige good. It remains the only such candidate known archaeologically from the BC Interior Plateau, dating to the Classic Lillooet occupation. No ceremony or sound is recorded for the piece itself; Hayden's wider reading of the site as a secret-society setting is an inference, and the bullroarer's identification a careful one rather than a certainty.

The strongest arguments for bone artifacts as prestige items can clearly be made for beads, bracelets, pendants, blanket pins, antler headdresses, bullroarers, net needles, buttons, and incised, polished, carved, or decorated pieces.

Brian Hayden, "Prestige Artifacts at Keatley Creek," in The Ancient Past of Keatley Creek, Vol. II (2000), p.193.

Particulars

Object

A worked bone artifact excavated from the Keatley Creek housepit village (Classic Lillooet occupation, roughly 350 BC–AD 850) and identified by archaeologist Brian Hayden as a probable bullroarer. It is the principal Interior-Plateau (British Columbia) archaeological bullroarer candidate, distinct from the historic-period wooden bullroarers documented for the Northwest Coast.

Function

Probable bullroarer recovered archaeologically and read by the excavator as a prestige/ritual object; no specific use is recorded for this specimen.