November is Pellc7ell7ú7llcwten in Secwépemcúl’ecw. It means “entering the winter home”, the time of year when the food stores were put up, firewood was gathered, and families settled into pithomes for the long winter months.
The wood & earth pithome (c7ístkten̓, in Secwepemctsin) is one of the hallmarks of precontact life on the Interior Plateau. It’s an Indigenous architectural tradition that began millennia ago. Today, only traces remain of these round, half-buried dwellings so perfectly suited to our cold interior winters.
When the first white men arrived in Secwépemcúl’ecw in the early 19th century, pithomes were the dominant type of residential structure. Villages of these houses dotted the major river valleys, ranging from a handful of pithomes belonging to closely related families to hundreds of dwellings making up bigger centers.
At Tranquille mouth, Brocklehurst, Sun Rivers, Monte Creek and Heffley Creek and elsewhere, pithome villages were occupied for thousands of winters. Picture the smoke rising from a crowd of conical roofs, the snow packed down on the winding trails connecting neighbours and kin.
Archaeologists have traced the Interior pithome architectural tradition back nearly 5,000 years. The earliest recorded pithomes on the Interior Plateau are near Monte Creek, on the South Thompson River east of Kamloops.
Occupation of pithomes here is the first good evidence archaeologists have of people settling into a pattern of sedentary winter living, where pithome villages became the anchor for a strategic kind of hunting-fishing-gathering that continued to exploit seasonally available resources all over the territory.
Pithome sizes varied over time, as social and economic patterns shifted, but the basics remained unchanged. Most pithomes were circular, though a few square and oval ones are known.
Inside, pithomes were often divided into four room areas that corresponded to the four cardinal directions. Sleeping platforms lined the walls and storage pits were dug into floors, and one or more hearth was found near the center.
Pithomes could be single-family dwellings measuring a few meters across, or be large enough to house large extended families. Some very large pithomes, measuring twenty meters or more across, are known to have been used as gathering places, like community centers or feast halls.
Constructing a pithome was labourious, and began with hand excavation of a large, bowl-shaped pit (earth was loosened with waist-high digging sticks and removed by the basketload). A group of adults and children working together could dig a big one in a day.
Over the pit, heavy timbers installed in the center supported a superstructure of rigid poles. Additional thinner poles were lashed on to form the roof, which was then covered with strips of bark, then packed with earth.
The strong frame and thick earth insulation was so effective that homes could maintain comfortable temperatures from only very small fires and body heat. This feature made the homes all the more well suited to sparsely forested places like Kamloops, where fuelwood could be a limited resources.
The primary construction material for pithomes was the aptly named lodgepole pine, which were harvested from nearby uplands by the dozen. Smaller timbers and insulation needed replacement every few years, and occasionally the whole thing was burnt, cleansed, and rebuilt.
By about 1858, log cabins modeled on fur traders’ dwellings had become main housing in Kamloops area. Some were built over old housepit depressions, which were repurposed as root cellars.
Other pithomes decayed in place, leaving characteristic rimmed, bowl-shaped depressions. Many were dug up and looted for artifacts, ploughed over, or filled in. Today, there are only handful of sites that contain more than a few depressions, as most have been destroyed (often illegally) to make way for urban development.
These ancient pithomes are protected archaeological sites, silently holding age-old stories of home.
