ART, ARTIFACTS, AND TECHNOLOGY more -->
The Keatley Creek site and other large Classic Lillooet sites such as the Bell site and the Bridge River site, have a very rich artistic tradition supported by the wealth and social hierarchies in these communities. This art was expressed in terms of prestige technology, pictographs (rock paintings), and petroglyphs (rock carvings).
Prestige technology included local materials that were time consuming to transform into artifacts as well as items procured from distances and which required considerable effort to manufacture or obtain. Elites in the Classic Lillooet communities used many prestige artifacts to display their control of wealth and labour, to reward supporters, and to arrange marriages, alliances, potlatch-style feast, validate status within communities, or make peace. They were therefore very important in the functioning of the community.
As a rule only wealthy individuals could hope to procure the most valuable of these items. There are a number of indications that the most powerful elites on the Columbia and British Columbia Plateau interacted in a systematic fashion to exchange prestige items with each other. The styles of some of these prestige artifacts from British Columbia's Interior Plateau and the Columbia Plateau to the South is remarkably similar. In this respect, they formed what has been called an 'interaction sphere' -- the 'Plateau Interaction Sphere'.
