Introduction

       Charlie Lake Cave is located
near the city of Fort St. John in northeastern British Columbia . The site is situated on an outcrop of sandstone above a small creek which drains to the nearby Peace River. Although the site is named after a small cave, most excavations have taken place in front of the cave mouth where a deep gully has been gradually infilling with sediment for the past 10,500 years. This gully was formed when a large slab of sandstone detached from the sandstone bedrock and slid a few meters down the hillside at about 10,500 B.P. Since then deposits have been building up in the gully, to a depth of five meters in some places. Thus for most of the site's history the cave was some meters above the floor of the gully, and was relatively inaccessible.

       The site was excavated in 1983 by Fladmark and in 1990 and 1991 by Driver and Fladmark. Most publications so far have concentrated on the 1983 excavations (Fladmark et al 1988; Driver 1988; Driver and Hobson 1992; Fladmark 1996; Driver 1996). A summary of the 1990's excavations can be found in Handly (1993) and Driver et al. (in press).

       Although the site contains a sequence of artifacts and fauna spanning the last 10,500 years, this paper deals with the first 1000 years of the site's history, documenting a transition from early post-glacial to typically Holocene faunas. This paper emphasizes the nature of the early environments, the timing of the transition from open to forested conditions, and discusses the human use of the early environments.