Happy “Birthday”, Vancouver

Unidentified Musqueam Chief as portrayed by Cardero in 1792. Source: Vancouver Sun.

The City of Vancouver had its 125th anniversary yesterday, and the local press was full of reflective pieces on civic leaders, famous visitors, notable crimes and, of course, sports.  Well, it would be churlish not to wish Vancouver Happy Birthday!  Well done, Vancouverites.  But in all the coverage of this momentous event, I only see one single article which acknowledges that people might have lived at the mouth of the Fraser River for a tad longer than 125 years.  And a curious article (PDF)  it is: Ancient history of Vancouver’s first peoples: The city’s history predates its 1886 founding, with a native midden dating back 9,000 years

BC Archaeology Forum Roundup

Musqueam Potlatch Dish, made 1895. Photo by Derek Tan. Source: MoA, CC Licenced.

It was fun to attend the BC Archaeology Forum on the weekend.  First and foremost, the Musqueam First Nation were gracious hosts who provided a warm and thoughtful welcome, and plentiful, delicious meals. Together with the organizing committee from the UBC’s Laboratory of Archaeology, the event was an incredible bargain for 30 bucks, including dinner. I took in most of the talks. The short review is that it was an extremely successful forum, well attended, with interesting papers spanning the province and important issues raised.  The long review has become really long, so you’ll have to continue reading on page 2.

Glenrose Cannery Under Threat?

Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculpture from Glenrose and St Mungo Cannery sites. Source: Delta heritage passport

The Glenrose Cannery site, which lies on the Fraser River near the Alex Fraser bridge, is one of the mose significant archaeological sites in BC.  The human figure on the left, above, dates to the ‘St Mungo” phase, putting it at between 3500 and 5000 years old.  It might be the oldest known representation of a human being in British Columbia – well, to my knowledge, it is.  Yet, you can already see elements of the formline art appearing – look at the eyebrows, for example.  More importantly, look at the beard.  Look at the hair, pulled into a bun.  This is a portrait of an individual.  The artifact, which is probably a small handle for a chisel, is a masterpiece of Canadian art. The site in which it was found shows continuous occupation from the present to about 9,000 years ago and spans up to eight metres of vertical deposits.

So it is disturbing to think that Glenrose might be further affected by development, in this case, road building associated with the “Gateway Project”, a transportation infrastructure megathrust to get stuff to and from the Ports of Vancouver faster. There is a short article in The Province yesterday (archive) in which UBC Professor Emeritus RG Matson, one of the key figures in BC Archaeology, visits the site.   We can’t preserve everything from the past, clearly, or all cultures at all times would have been glued to the footprints of their forebears.  But a site of such demonstrated significance as Glenrose should probably be completely off limits.

Two upcoming events in Vancouver and Victoria

1936 Field Trip by the Vancouver Natural History Society to Musqueam. Source: Vancouver Public Library. VPL Accession Number: 19483

In Vancouver this Sunday, September 19 at 1.00 there is a guided walk of the Ancient Salmon Stream and Musqueam Village, starting at Jericho Beach (details here) with Victor Guerin, “a cultural/linguistic consultant and historian, a member of the Musqueam First Nation and a speaker of the Musqueam dialect of the Central Coast Salish language Halkomelem. He has been learning about his people’s culture and history his entire life, including some 16 years of consultation and documentation with family elders and 4 years formal training in the Musqueam language with linguistic analysts at UBC.”

This talk/walk is one in a series from the False Creek Watershed Society, most of which look like they hold promise for an interesting conversation between historical ecology, traditional knowledge, and landscape development.  It would be good to see connections built or strengthened between restoration groups and archaeologists, who share many of the same values.  You can see the other talks and walks they sponsor here – two of them are actually today, Saturday September 18th.  OK, go to those as well!

The other upcoming event is the  Archaeology Society of B.C. monthly public lecture in Victoria, which is on Tuesday 21 September.  This month’s speaker is Grant Keddie from the Royal B.C. Museum.

ASBC Victoria: May Public Lecture Tuesday 18th

Quartz Crystal projectile point with Stave Watershed in background.

Seven Thousand Years of Occupation at the Ruskin Dam Site, Stave River Watershed

Duncan McLaren, Ph.D. and Brendan Gray, M.A.

This month’s Archaeological Society of B.C. (Victoria Chapter) free public lecture will be about a fascinating site recently excavated by Cordillera Archaeology in the Stave River watershed, near Vancouver:

Excavations of the Ruskin Dam Site, located on the north side of the Fraser Valley, were conducted over four months in 2009 as part of a salvage project.  Our talk will discuss the significance of the major discoveries at the site including: the house features, quartz crystal tools, biface styles, woodworking technology, objects of personal adornment, and faunal remains which contain a high proportion of sturgeon bones.  Combined, the artifacts, radiocarbon dates, and site stratigraphy provide a unique opportunity for gaining a perspective on the long-term occupation of this strategically located archaeological site.

I expect this talk will also indirectly exemplify the leading role B.C. Hydro is playing in enlightened Cultural Resource Management in this province.

This talk is free and open to any member of the public.

Tuesday May 18 at 7.30 P.M.

Pacific Forestry Centre, 506 West Burnside Road.

For information,  e-mail asbcvictoria@gmail.com , or leave a comment/question below.

Capilano University Field School Blog

"At each logging camp a familiar discovery was a wood burning stove or oven. The one pictured {above} had stumped some former students of Muckle's in the past because the student who helped recover the stove had read an engraving on the side saying "To Jake". After pondering upon this curious inscription, it was realized that the "J" had incorrectly been read, and the whole etching had actually said "To Bake", commonly found on ovens." Source: http://archaeologyfieldschool.blogspot.com/

I noticed that the Capilano University Archaeology Field School, which just started a few days ago near Vancouver, has a blog.  So far there are three days worth of entries and it looks like it will be a lot of fun to follow along with the students who, under the direction of  Bob Muckle, will be continuing to work on the archaeology of historic logging in the Seymour River Watershed, which flows into Burrard Inlet.  Much of the logging was conducted by Japanese immigrants, making for a nice overlay of ethnicity and capitalism and material culture.

More on the Sea-to-Sky Cultural Journey

Sign at the Horsehoe bay kiosk. Source: tad McIlwraith flickr.com account.

A month or two ago I commented on the Squamish and Lil’wat Cultural Journey website, which explores oral history and place names in the traditional territory of these two southwestern British Columbia First Nations.  I was really happy to see that Douglas College Anthropologist (and occasional commenter here) Dr. Tad McIlwraith has carried the review much further.  He’s even taken it into the field, so to speak, by documenting and discussing the actual cultural centre itself, and also the roadside kiosks which bring Squamish and Lil’wat histories to the travelling public.

Tad’s review has two parts.

Basket Conservation at the Langley Centennial Museum

N'laka'pamux Basket undergoing conservation treatment. Source: LangleyMueum.org

I know I occasionally grumble about how regional, publicly funded museums in B.C. are almost devoid of archaeological and aboriginal substance, especially on the web.  A happy exception to this is the Langley Centennial Museum near Vancouver, which has an unusual and interesting virtual exhibit of N’laka’pamux basketry.  The museum is in the possession of a large collection of these baskets, made by an interesting historical figure from the Yale-Lytton area of the Fraser River: one Kathleen Pearson. The exhibit consists of a number of pages, including a short essay (5 pages) which is strangely not clearly linked, based around Boas et al.’s 1928 Bureau of American Ethnology Publication.  The museum goes beyond the historical frame by discussing recent named weavers such as Mary Ann James, and the continuing tradition of N’laka’pamux basket making.

It is really great to see a relatively small museum explicitly recognizing that the world didn’t begin in 1846 and going beyond the story of white settlers as if they were a self contained pod of culture beamed down from Queen Victoria’s forehead.  The other thing  I particularly like about this small web exhibit is that the museum highlights the activities of another group of unsung heroes in the world of heritage conservation: the conservators who restore, stabilize and protect the artifacts entrusted to museums.

Katzie Artifact Gallery

Ground stone celts (adze and chisel blades). Source: Katzie.ca

Hmmm: the pictures are low resolution, there isn’t much annotation, many are of replicas, and the page design HTML is wonky, causing a lot of sideways scrolling.  Yet I really like the Katzie First Nation’s artifact gallery.  And no, its not only because they give ground stone its rightful pride of place.  Though, in the image above, feast your eyes on the uppermost left specimen – an unusual yet definitive example of a broad celt being bisected to form two narrow ones.  In essence, an adze is being turned into two chisels.  Chew on that, Spaulding and Ford. Also check out the specimens in the centre-right, where the sharpened bits differ in colour from the bodies.  These are either patinated specimens subsequently reground and recycled, or speak to a process of heat treating or oiling or similar to enhance the raw material.  You could read all about this in my M.A. thesis if it were online, which it isn’t.  Or wasn’t until five minutes ago.  But I digress.

What I like is the text associated with these images.

Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Lab

A flake of obsidian from DhRr-18, southern British Columbia. This visually-distinctive glass is from the Mount Garibaldi obsidian source.

Obsidian is a kind of volcanic glass and was highly prized for making certain kinds of stone tools.  Obsidian forms at places of relatively small outflows of magma, or liquid rock.  Small flows can cool quickly, which allows the formation of a glassy crystalline structure ideal for stone tool manufacture.  Small flows also represent a small sample of well-mixed magma, and thus each little patch of obsidian may share a very distinctive chemical signature.  This signature, usually identified by trace elements such as Strontium, Zirconium, Yttrium and Rubidium, then allows for the chemical fingerprinting of each source.  Any obsidian artifact found, whether at a source or not, can also be “fingerprinted” and then compared to a catalogue of known obsidian ources.  Since the artifacts don’t move around on their own but only through the agency of humans, the distribution of obsidian artifacts is a proxy measure for the movement and interaction of people.  When you have hundreds or thousands of such artifacts and a large database of known sources, then you can start to see large scale, long-term social interaction emerge from the silent archaeological record.  Most obsidian isn’t visually distinctive enough to sort out by eye alone, so these geochemical methods are essential.

So far, so Archaeology 101.  I was really happy to find that Oregon’s Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory has a web site not which not only solicits business, but is a highly educational and informative site about many aspects of obsidian analysis, with a focus on the Northwest.