Category Archives: Archaeology

McLennan & McFeely 1908-1914 Catalogue (update)

Posted on December 17, 2009 | 3 comments

Railroad wheelbarrows from McLennan and McFeely catalogue.

I posted previously about this excellent resource which the City of Vancouver Archives has put online: the McLennan and McFeely catalogue of industrial, farm and fishing equipment, 1908-1914.  In that post, I moaned a little about how nice it would be to be able to download a single PDF of all 1400+ pages.  To my delight and happiness (and surprise, I must admit, because it can have been no trivial task) Sue Bigelow of the  Archives has posted a note indicating that they have now made such a document available for download (link in upper right hand corner of this page).  It is 270 megs, but I have it now and what an amazing resource.  Thanks so much to Sue and to the City of Vancouver Archives – as I said, this is potentially a huge aid for historical archaeologists and indeed any archaeologist who encounters historical debris.

Mangles!

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Posted in Archaeology, archives, history, Technology

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Videos of Gwaii Haanas Archaeology

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

Daryl braves the barrage of bras to set the Vancouver Aquarium straight on the value of dead fish over living fish. Click to play part 1.

Rockwash superstars Nicole and Daryl show off their cool wares in a couple of videos I just found online – I vaguely remember them going off to give this talk at the Vancouver Aquarium.  It’s in two parts: 1 and 2.  Nicole looks fabulous and Daryl has trimmed his beard!  Win-Win.  The projects they describe sure were a lot of fun to take part in.   There are a few other talks up including Lyle Dick and Norm Sloan on Sea Otters on the Gwaii Haanas Youtube Channel.

A sandhill crane is a tough act fo follow but Nicole hammers home the righteous message of dead fish. Click to play part 2.

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Posted in anthropology, Archaeology, fieldwork, Haida Gwaii, Northwest Coast, underwater archaeology

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Archaeology in Action: a flickr.com photo pool

Posted on December 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

Archaeologists? No -- "Pothunters" destroying a site on the Columbia River, ca. 1966. Source: flickr user gbaku.

Archaeology in Action is a large set of pictures of archaeologists doing archaeology on the photo sharing website flickr.com.  Not too much Northwest Stuff there that I could find with the notable exception of many pictures put up by a former University of Oregon professor under the name of gbaku (you can find his real name easily enough).  His pictures are a wonderful tour of Oregon and Alaskan archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s – these are not sets of pictures of stratigraphy, or backdirt (interesting though those things are) but are predominately of, well, archaeologists in action.  It would be fun to see more NW Coast pictures up here — I know Grant has a large collection of pictures of archaeologists going about their business and I am sure we all have some pictures of people in with the endless pictures of yet another bone.

Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason mysteries and many other books, and Luther Cressman, pioneering archaeologist and ex-husband of Margaret Mead, at Fort Rock Cave in 1966.

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Posted in alaska, anthropology, Archaeology, archives, history, Northwest Coast, Oregon, pics

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Somenos Creek: Update 2

Posted on December 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

CHEK-TV video clip on the Somenos Creek archaeological situation. Click to play.

Someone passed along this CHEK-TV news item showing George Schmidt of TimberCrest Estates, Ltd., the development company wishing to put houses on top of a major archaeological site in the Cowichan Valley at Somenos Creek, which I’ve written about before: 1, 2.

Listen to the favourable treatment he gets from the newscaster. Loaded language like “In limbo”. “Pony Up”.

Hey, CHEK-TV, since you’re the voice of the people now and all that and also “journalists”, how about you dig around in the zoning history of the land before you just repeat the mantra “government must pay”.  Did the developer buy this land already zoned for residential development?  How much did he pay in 1972?  Does he deserve compensation for having a risk turn out the wrong way for him?  Does he have the right to destroy a cemetery?  Is he, in fact, losing anything that he already had, or is he losing a perceived entitlement?  He took a risk, he has gained mightily, and now he wants a slice of the First Nation’s pie as well.

I’d seriously suggest CHEK-TV also looks into the $500,000 amount he claims to have spent on archaeology at Somenos Creek.  From what little I know of the site, I am very skeptical about that figure.

Truly, there needs to be a mechanism by which true hardship cases of conflict between development and archaeology, or where the impact assessment process has failed, can be resolved.  That, indeed, may mean some government financial input.  But these should be reserved for instances where other options have run out and where there is demonstrable financial hardship.  This case does not pass the smell test – vast profits have assuredly been made and now legal and moral constrains are drawing a line under this development.

I say this company should stop going cap in hand to the government and just give the land up as a heritage park in return for a tax receipt.  Unless I am mistaken, most entrepreneurs are not socialists, and I  am sure the last thing the typical developer would want is to be perceived as a corporate welfare bum.

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Posted in Archaeology, Cultural Resource Management, Northwest Coast, Vancouver Island

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Annotation: Kilgii Gwaay excavations.

Posted on December 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

Excavation at Kilgii Gwaay, southern Haida Gwaii.

I’ve found that individual powerpoint slides can be saved as JPG images, complete with their annotations.  Since I have a lot of these I may share some.  The above shows excavation in the shell-rich component of the intertidal site at Kilgii Gwaay.  The combination of shellfish remains and saturation in slightly alkaline sea water has produced remarkable preservation for a site which is firmly dated via about 20 carbon samples to 9450 14C BP, or around 10,700 calendar years ago.  In this picture you can see some of the evidence: bone tools, stone tools, and the remains of shellfish, fish and mammals which, together with birds, formed the basis of the diet at this summertime camp.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, Haida Gwaii, Northwest Coast, Teaching

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Raven-Walking & Geological Transformation

Posted on December 10, 2009 | 2 comments

Haida History starts at least 14,500 years ago. (Image credit: Daryl Fedje).

Three things we know about Haida Gwaii:

1.  About 14,500 calendar years ago it was a temperate tundra environment, with no trees.  The first trees, pine, appear about 14,000 years ago and there is progressive forest infilling thereafter, with the modern species mixture in place by about 3,000 years ago.

2. It has an impoverished suite of large land mammals – historically, these were limited to black bear, caribou, marten, ermine, a vole and a shrew.  We know that 13,000 years ago there were also deer and brown bear on the islands, and quite likely other species as well.

3.  It used to be much larger than in the present.  With lower sea levels at the end of the last ice age, Hecate Strait was largely dry land, exposing a large, unglaciated, coastal plain that became rapidly flooded.

It seems to me that we can add a fourth thing we know:

Continue reading →

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Posted in anthropology, Archaeology, First Nations, Haida Gwaii, history, Northwest Coast, palaeontology

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Northwest Anthropology Conference: NWAC 2010

Posted on December 9, 2009 | 4 comments

The web site for NWAC 2010, to be hosted at Central Washington University March 24 – 27, 2010 in Ellensburg, Washington,  is up and running.  NWAC is a great conference which we were lucky to host in Victoria a couple of years ago.  In case you are wondering where Ellensburg is (no offence), it’s just to the east of the Cascades from Seattle, north of Yakima, about a 350 km drive from Victoria: map.

The theme of this year’s conference is the very welcome “At a Crossroads”:

Anthropology at the Crossroads” is the theme for the Northwest Anthropology Conference (NWAC), Ellensburg, Washington, March 24 – 27, 2010. While all submissions will be considered, this conference will offer opportunities for multiple perspectives on where we are as a discipline, society, and species, with a special emphasis on people and the environment. The “Anthropology at the Crossroads” conference will include symposia and presentations on subjects from archaeology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, paleoanthropology, primatology, medical anthropology, visual anthropology, and others. We invite submitters to use their own preposition in describing their presentation/symposia as “Anthropology at/of/on/etc the Crossroads.” Studying the past, understanding the present, and preparing for the future, makes Anthropology even more relevant today as the discipline continues to assert the importance of an appreciation for culturally diverse modes of interacting with our environment. Thus, this conference is a crossroads where the exchange of ideas better prepares us, our students, and our work to serve the communities we live in as we maintain our commitment to exchanging and transmitting our under-standings of all people, in all places, and at all times. “Anthropology at the Crossroads” also implies interaction among sub-disciplines and communities in an integrated fashion and in this manner encourages self reflection on the relevance of Anthropology today at a moment when we appear to be at several global crossroads.

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Posted in alaska, anthropology, Archaeology, First Nations, Northwest Interior, Northwest Coast, Teaching, Washington State

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Quantitative Zooarchaeology Blog

Posted on December 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

killer, qmackie, and archaeomath: three people who like fish (maybe just a little too much).

It’s a niche blog for sure, but at archaeomath someone is writing a series of highly detailed posts on quantitative zooarchaeology, with an emphasis on fish bone.  The posts on inference of net gauge, intensification of fishing practice, and estimation of MNI are particularly interesting and definitely relevant to the Northwest Coast.  Anyone who can introduce their blog with: “The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences using various mathematical tools to address archeological problems that interest me. Mathematical models, when done well, make assumptions explicit and clarify how processes operate” has my admiration and appreciation.  Anonymous Faunal Analyst with your Geospatially Ambiguous Shell Midden and Bones of Unspecified Taxa: we salute you!

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Posted in Archaeology

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Peavies, pickaroons, hookaroons and skid tongs

Posted on December 6, 2009 | 4 comments

Double-bitted axes, available by the case.

It’s pretty common to run into historic industrial equipment when doing archaeological work in BC, especially logging equipment.  The Vancouver City archives has put the entire McLennan, McFeely & Co. Ltd Catalogue 1908-14 online, albeit in a somewhat awkward format (hey guys, why not just post a single PDF as well?) (edit: see comments below).  This catalogue would have been the ordering bible for many remote logging, mining and cannery outfits up and down the coast, the remains of which are often lying atop shell middens or strewn in the intertidal zone.  Altogether, the Vancouver City Archives and the Burnaby Village Museum have put  more than 1,500 pages of historic merchandise, as well as ordering and shipping information and price lists. Click on an image and it brings up a legible PDF of that single page.

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Posted in Archaeology, archives, history, Technology

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Somenos Creek: Update

Posted on December 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

Somenos Creek site. Picture this with 20 houses on it. Photo credit: anonymous.

Further to my post below, here is another news item on the Somenos Creek (Cowichan Valley) situation.  It mostly rehashes the Times-Colonist piece but does have new comments from Eric and from the developer, notably:

Schmidt, who has tried but failed to have the six-acre site, known as Lot B, rezoned for development, said it would be worth up to $3 million if it weren’t for the presence of the artifacts and burial site.

Timbercrest has built about 300 homes on the land so far and would like to put up another 20 on Lot B.

So, lets see 20/300 = 6.7% of the 100 acres.  The 100 acres was bought in the 1970s.  I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that much less than 1 million was paid for the 100 acres back then.  The current valuation of these six acres would value the entire parcel at 45 million.  Let’s halve that:m 22 million.

So this developer has turned a one million dollar piece of land into a 20 million dollar piece of land.  A 2000% return.  And he wants financial consideration and compensation from the public because he happens to have a legally-protected (and morally protected, I might add) site of the highest archaeological significance on the residual piece?

This is the 21st century: Greed is no longer good, Timbercrest Estates Ltd.  Give the land up, get a tax writeoff, and count your blessings you live in a country that is so extremely friendly to rampant development of land, enabling fortunes to to be made.

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Posted in Archaeology, Cultural Resource Management, First Nations, Northwest Coast, Vancouver Island

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