GOOGA!
This 1962 picture of Haida artist Robert Davidson at age 13 caught my eye, not least because he looks a lot like his nephew, Haida archaeologist and great guy Allan “Googa Boy Lefty ClamBone Monica Sunshine” Davidson. Here’s Allan tending to his espresso pot at Richardson Island. Very shareable. I am pretty sure this was before I accidentally tossed a grub into his cup.
Posted in archives, First Nations, Haida Gwaii, history
Tagged Haida, Haida Gwaii, history, Northwest Coast
Indian Fort at Cadboro Bay, 1849
The Royal BC Museum was ahead of the curve in putting significant parts of its collection. One thing I like is their small but relevant collection of maps and charts. The 1849 chart inset to the left shows an “Indian Fort” in Cadboro Bay, for example. There is a good selection of Admiralty Charts from the mid 19th Century, Pemberton’s 1861 map of Victoria (the “Bay” in this section is the real “James Bay”, now landfill under the Empress Hotel , where the bridge shows is now the causeway), and a 1911 map showing the Economic geography of Haida Gwaii (which interestingly includes Sea Otter as part of the fauna “on the west coast” since that species is thought to have been extirpated much earlier). It is always surprising and sobering to see just how quickly remote areas were divided up and labelled according to their perceived economic value in a way that borders on propaganda, but there is realism too check out the instructions to family men. Now the bad news: the price of being first is often not being very good. I suspect when these went online bandwidth was a realy problem. Each chart is split up into 100kb segments and it is not possible to download the entire thing at once. The full size images must exist, so how about a quick project at the RBCM to make them downloadable in their entirety? Same goes for the picture archives.
Posted in archives, Haida Gwaii, history, Northwest Coast, Vancouver Island
Tagged archives, charts, Gulf Islands, Haida Gwaii, history, maps, Northwest Coast, RBCM, Royal BC Museum, Salish Sea, Victoria BC
From the Hunterian, labelled as 19th Century.
I can’t get enough of this Haida argillite fish which the Glasgow Hunterian Museum has in their collection. Well, they say it’s a fish but it looks like it has flukes and large fins and if anything it looks like a harbour porpoise. On the other hand, there is a lateral line as well and the proportions are more like a herring. In any case, it is utterly charming and I have never seen a comparable carving. It looks to be about 30 cm long, which is quite large. More from the Hunterian in due course.
Posted in anthropology, First Nations, Haida Gwaii
Tagged argillite, Glasgow, Haida Art, Haida Gwaii, Hunterian Museum, Northwest Coast
Excavations at Collison Bay, 2006
This is another intertidal dig – the Collison Bay site, which shares a lot of similarities with Kilgii Gwaay. Both sites date to about 9450 C14 years ago and contain buried deposits in primary context below the modern beach. While Kilgii Gwaay contains a rich organic assemblage, Collison Bay does not, though there is evidence for a brown palaeosol at varyiong depths. In and around that palaeosol are numerous pristine lithics: stones tools and flakes that are sharp and clearly have not een rolled on a beach. One of the striking things about these two sites is they show how a major event like a marine transgression can nonetheless leave intact cultural deposits. We suspect that much of this has to do with the local topography. Ideally, a bedrock rock rim allows for a small lagoon to form, creating an interlude of very low wave energy between when sea level rises over the site and when the full weight of waves can start to act on the surrounding shore. By the time the waves are able to penetrate, the archaeological materials are already several metres below low tide which affords quite a lot of protection.
As with Kilgii Gwaay, working in the intertidal zone poses certain challenges, such as having only a six hour window to work. In the case of Collison Bay, we compounded the issue by timing the project for when the best tides were in the middle of the night, which meant getting up at midnight and working to dawn in some cases (though we did have some good daytime digging as well). In this picture you can see we are using electric lights run off a generator while Cynthia does the hard work down on the beach; this is probably around 2.00 in the morning.
Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, Haida Gwaii, Northwest Coast, pics
Tagged Archaeology, Collison Bay, Haida Gwaii, Intertidal, Kilgii Gwaay, Northwest Coast
Parks Canada Underwater Archaeologist at Section Cove, 2006
Parks Canada has a great underwater archaeology unit. They have been coming out to dive on targets we’ve identified on the drowned terrestrial landscape of Haida Gwaii. This picture shows an archaeologist with a suction hose on the bottom near (though, sadly, not on) the target we identified at the outlet of the lake that formerly sat in Section Cove, near Huxley Island. This target is at about 33 metres below the surface, while the diver here is at about 27 metres down, so on a small bump above ancient landform of interest – not a place with zero potential, but not a huge amount either, we don’t think. The hose sucked out the bottom sediments into a mesh bag which could then be lifted by crane onboard the mother ship, and screened on deck. Therefore, it was not really a lift hose, but the system worked pretty well though as I say, it was not applied to the precise location of the high potential. In future years once this dive team perfects their procedures for working in this difficult location and at challenging depths we hope to find some very cool archaeological stuff dating to the terminal Pleistocene / end of the last ice age.
Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, Haida Gwaii, pics, underwater archaeology
Tagged Archaeology, Haida Gwaii, SCUBA, underwater archaeology
Submersible at Section Cove
A few years back I fulfilled a lifetime ambition by going down in a submersible. This shows the Nuytten craft “Aquarius” on the surface in front of the warden’s cabin on SW Huxley Island in Gwaii Haanas (map). We tried diving onto the ancient lake that now lies drowned at 33 metres below sea level, more or less in front of the cabin. This lake would have been last exposed to air about 10,000 14C years ago. We started at about 110 metres down and then worked our way up a palaeo-river channel towards the lake, but unfortunately got off course and ended up a lot closer to the beach than we had anticipated. These things are flown by a pilot, but the basic navigation is by transponders on the bow and stern of the mother ship which allow triangulation from a known point. Apparently, not foolproof! The lake we were diving onto shows huge potential for an archaeological site. We are thinking there may have been a base camp for bear hunting at Gaadu Din 1 or 2, which are less than a kilometre away. Possibly, too, there was a sockeye salmon fishing camp here, since the nearby caves contain numerous salmon bones from the late Pleistocene. Anyway, it was pretty cool to go down in the submersible!
Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, pics, underwater archaeology
Tagged Archaeology, Haida Gwaii, Northwest Coast, submersible, underwater archaeology
Gaadu Din 2007
In 2007 we returned to Gaadu Din 1, a cave on the east side of Huxley Island (map) in Haida Gwaii. In the front is Jenny (Jinky, Sniffer, Killer), while behind left to right you see her fellow UVIC graduate students Brendan (Binky, Loafer, Skipper, Dumper) and Adrian (Goat-Boy), while to the right is Jordan (Haida Watchman – which is not a nickname!). The cave entrance can be glimpsed between Brendan and Adrian. Gaadu Din has revealed an incredible record of terminal Pleistocene fauna and artifacts, showing Ancestral Haida winter-time bear hunting as early as 10,600 14C years ago (13,000 calendar years ago). Among the fauna are black bear, which still live on Haida Gwaii, but also brown (grizzly) bear and coast deer, neither of which were known to be native to these islands (deer are common on Haida Gwaii, but these are historically introduced). The deer in Gaadu Din all date to a narrow time window just prior to the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period, and presumably could not survive those harsh, snowy conditions, and had no way of repopulating the now-remote archipelago after modern climatic conditions arose.
Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, Karst, Northwest Coast
Tagged Archaeology, bears, caves, Gaadu Din, Haida Gwaii, Karst
Profiling the south wall of the Richardson Island site 2002
The Richardson Island site (map) is a deeply stratified raised beach site. In this picture, Duncan’s feet are at about 9300 14C years ago, while the top of the gulch is about 8400 14C years ago. The horizontal 2 X 4 more or less demarcates the lower “Kinggi Complex” from the “Early Moresby Tradition” – the latter being marked by the introduction of bifacial technology to the stone toolkit, but also characterized by continuity between the two in many other regards. There are some 20 major depositional units in that span, and more than 100 separable layers. We think the site formation process is of a supra-tidal marine berm which was “pushed uphill” during a period of rising sea level — people lived on top of this berm but would periodically come to the site and find a fresh dump of finely-sorted pea gravels. Although high-energy, the berm formation was also surprisingly gentle, allowing for numerous features such as hearths and post-moulds to preserve, not to mention pristine flakes which, in some cases could be refit one to another. The thick reddish band just above Duncan’s head is a major berm deposit which was dumped as a single event, or several shortly-spaced events, around 9200 14C years ago. Digging this site was a challenge – some of the layers were concreted together like iron and required some chiseling, and colour differences between some layers were often very slight. Indeed, it became a full body experience as the texture and looseness of the gravels was very important, and on occasion, it was noted that some layers smelled differently than others.
Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, Haida Gwaii, pics
Tagged Archaeology, berms, Duncan, gravel, Haida Gwaii, Richardson Island
Duncan with his feet in a 12,000 year old bog
While doing the Anthro 449 site, I’m finding a lot of pictures I haven’t seen lately, so I might as well post some of them here. This one shows Duncan digging at Kilgii Gwaay (map) in 2002. This was an unusual project, working in the intertidal zone between tidal windows — so about 6 hours per day of frenzied activity (read: poor napping) until the unit flooded again. In this instance, the unit was 4 foot by 4 foot to accomodate the dimensions of plywood shoring. There wasn’t a lot down in this unit, at least not archaeologically, but we do have a huge sample of woody bits from the organic deposits at the bottom. In essence, the unit was placed on the edge of an ancient pond that formed post-glacially and then lived a quiet life in the anonymous southern forests of Haida Gwaii – only to be rudely interrupted around 9450 14C years ago by rising sea levels, which made it attractive for a brief window of human occupation. So – from a small pond in the forest, to a busy camp site, to a beach, all in a span of about 50 years. And now, with falling sea levels, back to a beach. The archaeological site is eroding somewhat, but nonetheless there are patches of intact shell midden and as it shows here, a large amount of terrestrial freshwater-saturated pond splooges under this beach.
Posted in Archaeology, fieldwork, Haida Gwaii, pics
Tagged Duncan, Haida Gwaii, Kilgii Gwaay, Splooge
I am preparing the website on Haida Archaeology, for which my Anthropology 449 students have been making the content. I started doing it all on WordPress, but I found I was struggling with the use of so many pages on a system that was primarily designed for blog posts, with items scrolling away off the page. So I switched to using iWeb, which has something of a learning curve but I think it will work better in the end. Nonetheless it is taking a lot of time and I would definitely do some things differently next time. But then, next time I will know what I know now!
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Northwest Coast Archaeology 
