Screenshot from the online document about Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, showing his iron-bladed "man's tool", and a small copper bead found with the body. Source: Royal BC Museum.

Many readers of this ever-more occasional blog will be aware of the exciting and profound discovery in 1999 of the well-preserved remains of a young man frozen in a glacier in Northwestern British Columbia.  Found within the traditional territory of the Champagne-Aishihik First Nation, the man was given the name Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, or “Long Ago Person Found.”  In the spirit of discovering what messages from the past that Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi might bearing, a remarkable collaborative research project was commenced. Results of this study have been presented at numerous conferences and in the scientific literature, but a landmark event hopefully just around the corner is the publication of a book recounting all the cultural and scientific knowledge borne into the present by this unfortunate young man.

While we wait for the book, it is very exciting to see that the Royal BC Museum has made a non-technical, well-illustrated overview document online which tells the main threads of the story of Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi.

The document can’t be downloaded, but it does open in a beautiful full-screen mode and at almost 60 pages, it’s a short book in its own right.   The uploaded document appears to draw out significant highlights from all aspects of the research with which I am familiar, and in a sense can probably be seen as an outline of the book as a whole.  I hear that the final book will be aimed at a lower undergraduate level, and that there may be dozens of separate chapters by around seventy different authors. [Update: the linked document now contains a Table of Contents for the forthcoming book, starting on Page 59.)

While comparisons to "Ötzi", the frozen man found in the Tyrolean Alps, are inevitable, it is my firm belief that when readers are able to see the profound connections formed between Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, descendent communities, and researchers, then they will see a sort of transcendent alteration of social relations in the present which Ötzi, for all his deserved notoriety, has never really achieved.

Kudos to the Royal BC Museum for making this document available, and to the authors, researchers, other institutions, and above all, the community members who have worked so hard for over a decade to allow the faint voice of Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi to be heard.  In particular, the online document is written by Richard Hebda, Sheila Greer and Alexander Mackie.

It's very exciting to think of the book being out sometime soon-ish, I'll definitely make a post about it when the time comes!

Screenshot of the online book, showing details of the gopher skin robe Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi was wearing at the time of his death. Source: Royal BC Museum.

Duncan McLaren using Livingstone core on Castor Poop Lake on Porcher Island, B.C.. Daryl Fedje holds the leash.

Next up for the local (Victoria) branch of the Archaeological Society of B.C. is a Tuesday, November 15th talk by Dr. Duncan McLaren of Cordillera Archaeology and the Anthropology Department at University of Victoria.  Duncan’s highly successful  Ph.D. thesis was an interdisciplinary, geoarchaeological approach to the early occupation of the Dundas Island group on the northern B.C. coast. He is now in the early stages of applying a similar research program to the Central Coast of B.C., which promises great advances in knowledge.

The talk is free and open to the public, and you don’t need to be an ASBC member to attend.

Early Period Archaeology and Landscapes on the Central Coast of British Columbia

November 15th, 2011, 7:30 pm
Pacific Forestry Centre,
506 West Burnside Road (Map)

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

ASBC Nanaimo Members in the Field, 2011: Photo: Colleen Parsley, Source: ASBC Nanaimo.

I posted this as a comment a few days ago, but decided it was worth a post on its own: there is a worrisome news snippet in the Nanaimo paper concerning the Archaeological Society of BC, Nanaimo Chapter. (At least, I infer this is the society in question!).

The full text indicates there will be a public meeting on Monday November 7th at Vancouver Island University which suggests the Nanaimo organization is in tough times:

7 p.m. The Archaeological Society is on the brink of collapse. If you feel the archaeology of Nanaimo and area has significant value, please come share your ideas at Bldg 356 Room 109 on the VIU campus.

This is one of three branches of the ASBC, and until fairly recently one of the most active, with good public speaking and field programs. As recently as last summer there was a newsletter issued and fieldwork undertaken, as the picture above from their website shows.

If you’re an ASBC member and live near Nanaimo, or if you just care about archaeology in BC, then it’d be a good idea to go.  The meeting need not be a wake, maybe it could be a rebirth.

There’s nothing on the ASBC-N website, which is why I thought it worthwhile posting here.  There is an unfortunate Balkanization of the ASBC – ideally, there would be a community email Listserv for important news province-wide.  If you know what’s going on, then by all means post something in the comments here.  The Victoria Chapter  of the ASBC is probably the most active one right now and it would be good to lend moral support from a distance.  The Vancouver Branch is, as far as I understand, actually the “Real ASBC” and so maybe they have an interest or even obligation to support the Nanaimo Branch, if the news report is not overly alarmist.

Duwamish composite stone anchor. Source: UW.

I was talking the other day about how under-represented organic technology is in archaeology generally, and especially on the Northwest Coast, where the old adage is that 95% of the technology was made out of plants (trees, wood, bark, roots, grasses, seaweeds).  A classic example of this phenomenon are anchor stones and sinker stones.  While some of these stones had grooves or perforated holes (and are thereby very visible and durable in the archaeological record), many may have been made by the more simple, subtle and expedient method of simply wrapping line or basketry around an unmodified rock.  When the organic component rots away, as it will most of the time, then the archaeologist has, well, an unmodified rock.

Anyway, it was a lucky stroke for my current interest that I came across the above photo from the University of Washington Digital Archives.

The makers of this anchor stone appear to have come to a similar solution to, or been inspired by, an Admiralty pattern anchor.  Anchors achieve a great deal of their holding pattern from the chain rode, which lies on the bottom and acts as a shock absorber.  It would be interesting to see how this one works, though if it was intended for a canoe with low windage it might be very effective.

Equally, I wondered about Reef Netting, which requires a lot of heavy anchor stones to be put down, to tighten the canoe position against in this high-precision fishing technique.  The operating assumption has been this requires that a large number of sacrificial rocks (i.e., multiple rocks are sent down a single anchor line, making a composite too heavy to pull back up), but it seems to me this Duwamish design might “dig in” and not just be a heavy weight.  Admittedly, Norm Easton found a large number of anchor stones underwater at reef netting sites near Victoria and in the Gulf Islands – so there was net loss. (You can get his excellent UVIC thesis here, via here which has a lot of other Eastonian output). But in any case, the above is the most elaborate composite anchor from the NW Coast I’ve seen, I think.

A stick-braced anchor stone from Hoko River. Source: SPSCC.edu. Click to enlarge.

Anyway, more ancient anchor stones and net weights are known from some archaeological sites, notably Hoko River.  Once again I recommend the remarkable online photo archives put together by Dale Croes and his team for that site – home page here.  I’m reproducing a couple of images here of ca. 2,500 year old wrapped, unmodified rocks – you can view more here.  These artifacts at least have a stone component – browse around on the Hoko River photo site and see just how few of the artifacts would leave any trace at all: most of them.  Kind of sobering, and that bugs me, because sober is my least favourite word!

Simple bound sinker stones from Hoko. Source: SPSCC.edu. Click to enlarge.

CT slice through Mastodon rib exposing bone point profile. Source: Waters et al. 2011.

For a long time, the Manis Mastodon site near Sequim, Washington was the elephant in the room of the Northwest Coast early period.  The apparent bone point embedded in a mastodon rib was seemingly hard to explain by any non-cultural means, yet maddeningly short of definitive proof, and so was politely ignored. The point has always been a thorn in my side too, which is why I have posted on it three times, once over a year ago, and twice recently.

Maybe I am a bit obsessed with it because if I rise gently from my sofa in Blog World Headquarters, being careful not to spill fine single malt on my pyjamas, then through my window I can see Sequim in the extreme distance, seemingly mocking me.

So all the more cathartic that today, with the publication of a convincing re-analysis of the mastodon rib by Michael Waters et al. in the respected journal Science, we can say that the  site is, indeed, evidence of humans hunting Mastodon on the Northwest Coast 13,800 years ago.  That’s about eight hundred years pre-Clovis.  Like I said before: it’s real.  It’s old. It’s on the coast.  Wow.

In common with many papers in this journal, it is very short: not much more than a single page.  There is quite a lot of additional meat in the online supplementary information, which I have seen.  Even so, I haven’t had time to digest the whole article, and my day job is being very demanding right now, so in addition to the general points I raised two weeks ago, here are some more points of interest.

1. The ancient DNA and protein analyses did not work well.  Nonetheless they are able to establish (more or less) that the point itself is made of mastodon bone. From the x-ray above, there is no question it is penetrative and not some kind of pathology.   The identification as “bone” (as opposed to tusk ivory) is referenced to “High-resolution x-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning (15) revealed that the osseous object embedded in the rib is dense bone shaped to a point (Fig. 1 and movies S1 and S2).”   Identification as mastodon obviously rules out antler and the rutting elk theories.  It would be nice to have tusk ivory completely and irrefutably ruled out by examination of cellular structure of the bone point, say.

Close up of Manis specimen. Note the weird eruptive material, within which is the narrow cylindrical bone point. Source: Waters et al 2011 Supplementary Material.

2. The sort of eruptive effect seen on the external pictures of the rib is unexplained – perhaps displaced rib cortical bone?  Close examination of the radiograph at the top of the post shows part of the rib surface bent down along the lower margin of the projectile, and perhaps part was forced upwards as well.  The rim of the eruptive zone does seem very clean where it meets the rib though.

3. The projectile itself is very narrow.  By the scale above, it is only about 4 mm in diameter.  The author’s note that to even contact the rib, the projectile would have had to penetrate 25 to 30 cm of  muscle, and connective tissue.  That’s a foot of meat!  And it doesn’t include the thick skin and hair. And yet, it still had enough grunt to penetrate the rib by over 2 cm.  I’d be more skeptical of this if I hadn’t recently seen Nick’s experiments of thrusting antler points through about 40 cm of ballistics gel, occasionally penetrating into an underlying piece of lumber.  One feature of those experiments to my eye was how tamely the shaft followed the point into the gel – and at Manis, presumably the bone projectile did not measure 32 cm X 0.4 cm: it must have thickened up, then met a shaft or foreshaft.   All the same, for a long, straight bone point then dense mastodon long bone would presumably be just the ticket. While mentioned in the article in passing, it would be quite interesting to see comparison to the Clovis bone rods, one of the largest collections of which is also from Washington State.  These early osseus artifacts are usually interpreted as hafting aids, though we hashed out their potential as bone points in this space a while back – see this quick picture from Lyman et al 1998.

In any case, comparison of the new image to the previous one shows the older one was actually quite misleading.  The new CT scans include some 3-d images (and apparently an online rotational animation of the CT scan in three dimensions, but I haven’t seen those yet  EDIT: see here).  It takes a bit of effort to decode the one in the article (below) but I think it becomes clear that the bone point itself has a markedly narrow length:diameter ratio and is quite straight.  Narrow is good if the goal is to pass between ribs, and/or to penetrate very deeply to reach vital organs.  The pointy end is not that clear, but to my eye seems to be chisel shaped or beveled, though it might well be crushed or warped by the aforementioned linear foot of mastodon meat it just penetrated.  In any case, I think it extremely unlikely that this is a random splinter of bone, it is far more likely to be the end of a projectile point.  Waters is quoted in this Guardian article:

Waters placed the mastodon in an industrial-grade CT scanner at the University of Texas. “It’s more powerful than a hospital one. They’re taking slices every 0.06mm, half the thickness of a piece of paper,” he says. “The 3D rendering clearly showed that the object was sharpened to a tip. It was clearly the end of a bone projectile point.”

Three dimensional image from the Manis CT Scan. The pale cylinder running upper right to lower left is the point. The wave-shaped thin object is the rib surface, rest of rib is digitally removed. Note apparent rib surface shatter driven into cancellous rib, lower centre./ Edit: Waters podcast says apparent "shatter" is the broken tip of point rotated to one side, which makes it an even more likely artifact I think./ Source: Waters et al. 2011

4. One surprise is that they assert the animal did not, as previously thought, survive for months after this wound: there is no sign of wound healing.  This actually makes a tidier story of a single event “kill-butchery site”, for the authors also accept without comment at least some of the previous studies (e.g., D. Gilbow thesis) of the bones showing impact fractures, spiral fractures, cut marks, and a systematic pattern of disarticulation.  Hunting in a wetland is, of course, quite characteristic of  early American adaptations, and is also the pattern at the nearby, contemporaneous, Ayer Pond.  Daniel Fisherhas been able to do remarkably fine-grained seasonality studies on mastodon tusks – which may have an almost-daily encoding of growth.  It seems like a missed opportunity not to attempt this at Manis, thus establishing the season of death.  It would also have been most welcome for the supplemental materials to illustrate (with photographs) the bone characteristics said to result from butchery.  The compelling illustrative material from the Ayer Pond report sets a good example in this regard, allowing readers to clearly see the specimens in question and follow the argument closely.  It’d be great to see the Manis skeleton as a whole receive that treatment.

5. It does raise the question of whether there were any trees or bluffs around to fire the projectile from, which entered the animals middle back from above at about a 60 degree angle.  The authors suggest that perhaps it was a lance used in a thrusting motion, which I actually have some sympathy with – we made the suggestion at the SAA conference in Vancouver that some early NW Coast organic projectiles may have been killing lances for dispatching large fauna from boats, in caves, or other awkward places of inter-species rendezvous. Nick Waber is also including this general idea in his forthcoming thesis.  An atl-atl dart launched at close range at a downed mastadon can’t be ruled out, however.

6. A suite of radiocarbon dates were run, showing definitively that the rib (found out of context) is exactly contemporaneous with the rest of the mastodon (found in situ).  The table above shows the four new dates used, including the new one on the rib. A number of other dates were also run, all by Tom Stafford through the respected lab at Irvine (UCIAMS).  One curious feature of the dates is that, judging by the lab numbers (e.g., 11350, 29113), which are issued sequentially at Irvine, and comparing them to lab numbers from projects I have worked on, then these new Manis radiocarbon dates were run in about 2005.  This shows that the Manis reanalysis has been going on for quite some time.

7. The authors’ conclusions are apt, but strike a slightly sour note in some ways:

The absence of stone projectile points at Manis, Hebior, Schaefer, and Orcas Island and the presence of an osseous projectile point at Manis suggest that osseous projectile points may have been the pre- dominant hunting weapon during the pre-Clovis period. Bone and ivory points and other tools are common in the Upper Paleolithic of Siberia and in late Pleistocene sites in Beringia (22–24). They are durable and lethal hunting weapons that continued to be used during and after Clovis (16, 23, 25). The invention and spread of a new hunting weapon at 13 ka—the Clovis lithic point— may have accelerated the demise of or doomed the last megafaunal species.

As Dale Croes and David Rice commented in my earlier post, perhaps we really are dealing with a widespread pre-Clovis bone point tradition out here on the NW Coast, and elsewhere (though what about those pre-Clovis “Miller Points” and El Jobo points, etc.?).  In particular, they note Alex Krieger’s “pre-projectile point hypothesis”, which Waters et al. do not mention.  Speaking of authorship, it is most welcome to see Carl Gustafson as a co-author, considering his close connection to the site over the last 25 years.  I’ve moaned about the Manis uncertainty at length but, you know, without Gustafson we probably wouldn’t have anything to talk about at all.

But as I was saying, the rather cavalier assertion that the invention of Clovis projectile points somehow hastened the extinction of Megafauna seems once again to place undue privilege, or undue burden, on a sort of “Clovis Exceptionalism” which I think is unhelpful in early period archaeology.  In the Science news report (which is behind a paywall) Gary Haynes perpetuates the centrality of Clovis as an archaeological construct:

Haynes adds that the oldest Clovis sites are “only” 8 centuries younger than Manis. Thus the rib “may actually indicate the earliest beginning of the Clovis era, or an immediately proto-Clovis stage of human dispersal,” he says. “Proto-Clovis” peoples in small numbers may have filtered south from Beringia as early as 14,000 years ago, he says, although their impact was negligible until the arrival of Clovis technology. To Waters, such talk of “proto-Clovis” amounts to “grasping at straws.”

I mean, we don’t talk about Clovis as “pre-Folsom”, so I’m going to start a campaign to just outright banish the term “pre-Clovis” except strictly as a temporal marker – those folks were not trying to become Clovis, Clovis was an unknown cultural expression eight centuries in their future.

8. Speaking of Clovis Exceptionalism, I was very interested to see that one of the non-anonymous reviewers thanked in the article is Stuart Fiedel, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of any pre-Clovis occupation in the Americas.  Either he is in agreement with this paper, or his critique of the paper was insufficient to modify the authors’ strong conclusions, or to prevent publication in this top journal.  The paper thus seems almost “immunized” against certain genres of criticism.

Though really, with the equally convincing paper from earlier this year, also by Michael Waters et al., on the pre-Clovis Buttermilk Creek Complex (Friedkin Site) in Texas, it would be harder than ever to drive pre-Clovis advocates en masse over a cliff. And the fundamental insecurity at the heart of the “Clovis First” arguments was always that it only took one legitimate pre-Clovis site to pull aside that curtain.  I think it’s fair to say that we now have a handful of solid pre-Clovis sites, including at least four (Paisley Cave, Monte Verde, Ayer Pond and Manis Mastodon) on the western margins of the Americas, of which two are only a few tens of kilometers apart right here in the Salish Sea.  It’s a good time to be an archaeologist on the Northwest Coast.

Reconstructed trajectory and location of bone point relative to sample Mastodon. No Mastodons were harmed in the making of this image. Source: Waters et al. 2011 Supplementary Material.

Reference:

Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., H. Gregory McDonald, Carl Gustafson, Morten Rasmussen, Enrico Cappellini, Jesper V. Olsen, Damian Szklarczyk, Lars Juhl Jensen, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Eske Willerslev  2011.
Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington. Science  334 (21):351-353.

Detail of Archaeology Forum announcement. Click for PDF

I recently received the notice that the B.C. Archaeology Forum is to be held this November 11 and 12 in Squamish.  The event will be hosted by the Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nation, and is being organized largely by Rudy Reimer/Yumks.  Anyone can register for this event for a highly reasonable $10.00: full information is given in this PDF file. The Forum is a great event, bringing together Consultants, First Nations, Academics and Government Archaeologists in one place to share the latest discoveries and to talk policy and matters relating to the practice of archaeology.  The deadline for presenting is October 28th, but you can decide to simply attend closer to the last minute, I believe.

That said I won’t be making it this year because of an unbreakable commitment.  This highlights an unfortunate part of “Forum Culture” – it is routinely announced only a month or so in advance, even when the location is known much further ahead. Many people have to arrange to take time off, or gain advance permission or funding to travel, organize a ferry load of students, or at least keep their schedule clear for this event.  I think I’ve missed three of the last four for this reason. It’d be great if we could change this, and at least get the location and date out earlier – maybe by the beginning of summer.  Speaking of, next year it would be cool to have it on the Island.  Who’s up for it?

Parks Canada - UVIC Archaeological Project in the Intertidal Zone, 2010.

Next up for the local (Victoria) branch of the Archaeological Society of B.C. is a Tuesday, October 18th talk by Daryl Fedje of Parks Canada Archaeology. Details below; it is free and open to the public.  I know of some of this research to be presented and if I can add an editorial comment:it is now clearly demonstrated that the intertidal zone has very high potential for un-disturbed archaeological deposits, some of which show exceptional preservation.  These include not only classic “waterlogged sites” with woody preservation, but also numerous water-saturated shell middens, and even the remains of intact house features.  I think it’s probable that in the Salish Sea at least, the intertidal zone is a hugely unappreciated zone of interest and I hope the Archaeology Branch and Consulting Archaeologists are working together to make sure it gets a thorough examination. And, if they aren’t, then it would be welcome if First Nations were to apply pressure by demanding routine subsurface testing in intertidal zones as a minimum requirement for shoreline archaeological assessments, perhaps commenting to this effect when reviewing permit applications.  Anyway:

Intertidal Archaeology in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve

October 18th, 2011, 7:30
pm Pacific Forestry Centre,
506 West Burnside Road (Map)

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Abstract:  Recent investigations in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve included a focus on the intertidal zone. Analyses of cultural and paleoecological data obtained from these investigations has resulted in a more detailed sea level history for the area and, discovery of a suite of archaeological sites associated with sea levels slightly lower than modern. These now-intertidal sites include intact shell middens and apparent house features dating as early as 4,000 years ago.

Bio: The Victoria ASBC Branch president writes,  “Daryl Fedje is a long-time archaeologist with Parks Canada, now based in Sidney, B.C.  He is widely published, with a respected international reputation.  Research in the Gulf Islands that he directs, co-directs, or facilitates is some of the most current work relevant to the Victoria region – but of course with wider ramifications.“

Image from the Mammoth Trumpet. Source: CSFA. Click to enlarge somewhat.

While we wait patiently for the definitive word on the rumoured exciting new developments regarding the 14,000 year old, pre-Clovis Manis Mastodon site near Sequim, Washington, I thought it was worth a new post to pass on an article a regular reader of this blog brought to my attention.

The Center for the Study of the First Americans, the same organization who is now re-analysing Manis Mastodon, have for many years published a very informative newsletter they call the Mammoth Trumpet.  Some of the early issues are online, including one which has a 1987 report on the Manis site(PDF).  I had not seen this before (the whole archives are worth a post on their own) and the article has some interesting information, including the picture above.

Detail of representation Manis bone point x-ray. Source: CFSA, Mammoth Trumpet. Click to enlarge.

As you can see, there is a “drawing of a xerograph” (“photocopy, in current parlance) of the x-ray of the Mastodon rib which is causing current excitement.  It does look pointed!  Although it is, of course, a low-quality reproduction of an interpretation of an x-ray, if I follow the text correctly.  Nonetheless, it is the only actual representation of the “bone point” I have seen.  It doesn’t penetrate as far as I might have imagined, and the tip appears to be stubby (though doubtless strong, considering the likely compromises of strength vs. sharpness needed in bone technology.  Nonetheless it is “stubbier” seeming than the Gaadu Din 1 bone point mentioned previously).

Of equal interest is the image to the left, which shows a bone flake, plausibly produced by percussion.  This is the first actual image of the bone alterations at the site which I have seen.

And, in the interests of following along with the development of the site as we await the current research results, which I expect to focus very narrowly on the bone itself, the Mammoth Trumpet article contains lots of information about how the site was found, and excavated.  It sounds extremely challenging!  Gustafson was standing waist deep in muck when he found the bone in question, which was what transformed a more casual visit to a palaeontological site into an urgent need for archaeological excavation. This probably accounts for the poor ability to draw associations between the cobble spalls and simple stone tools found and the Mastodon itself.

Also of interest is the useful field reasoning that Gustafson showed.  Finding only one side of the Mastodon, he reasoned people might have displaced the other half nearby, disarticulated.  This proved to be the case.  And, he reasoned they might not want to camp in the gravelly muck, and that there might be a drier campsite nearby.  Through regularly spaced cores fanning out from the find, he followed the buried post-glacial land surface along until it started to rise to a slightly elevated, presumably drier, paleo-hummock.  Backhoe excavation there went through Mt. Mazama ash and, while no archaeological remains were found of Mastodon age, more recent stone tools were found and incidentally, bison remains which may have been butchered, lying on the same gravels as the Mastodon.  It makes me wonder if the same process could be followed at the Ayer Pond bison butchery site, or even the North Saanich bison find, which remains sadly under-investigated but is only palaeontological as far as we know.

I was also surprised to read that so much effort was out into this site over the 10 years before the Mammoth Trumpet piece – a lab was set up, etc – and yet so little was put into the scientific literature.  It’s a shame – useful palaeontological data not to mention archaeological must lurk somewhere, ready to be written up and pushed out.  As I know all too well, until you’ve published results, you haven’t actually done anything at all.

All in all, the article is worth checking out and indeed the whole CSFA website contains some rich information about the all aspects of the most ancient occupations of the Americas.  Emanual Manis died in 2000.  In 2002 Clare Manis donated the two-acre site to the non-profit Archaeological Conservancy in his memory. The article makes it clear we have a huge debt to the Manis family who very easily could have ignored the find or not allowed research to continue on their property.  Elephants never forget, they say, and neither will this one be forgotten, nor the landowners who brought it to light.  The Manis name will live on through the high profile the Mastodon site will continue to enjoy, especially when the new developments are published, which I expect we will be seeing very soon, indeed, and in the highest profile journals of the scientific world.

Emanuel "Manny" Manis poses with Mastodon tusks in 1977. Source: Sequim Museum.

Cropped screenshot of detail of cairn marking Sahsima, south Oak Bay. Source: Burnt Embers blog; click to visit.

I recently have started following a wonderful new blog called Burnt Embers.  It’s mostly a photo blog of the author’s surroundings – which appear to be deepest south Oak Bay, which is a municipality adjacent to Victoria, B.C. It’s a wealthy municipality not really known for being sensitive to archaeological concerns or First Nations history: for example, it’s the locale of the rather messy Esplanade controversy I documented last year (1, 2, 3).

Anyway, the blogger at Burnt Embers, one “ehpem”, has recently done a great service by bringing to light a series of attractive cairns, emblazoned with art by Tsartlip artist Charles Elliot (Temoseng), which pay tribute to Songhees and Straits Salish places, history, and names.  As ehpem points out, Oak Bay Council has erected these cairns but provides no other information about them, whether on their website or anywhere else.  They’ve  been sort of bolted onto the Oak Bay landscape.  No matter: ehpem has photographed them beautifully and assembled a great series of pages documenting each one and also created a google map which is really handy for getting around from cairn to cairn. The cairns are, in the order which ehpem documents them:

Sahsima – a transformer stone near the Chinese Cemetery.  Sahsima, meaning “harpoon”, was the original name identified by Songhees elder James Fraser for the point where the Chinese Cemetery is located: Hayls the Transformer, with spirit companions, Raven and Mink, came by in his canoe, frightening away the seal the harpooner had been stalking. The harpooner rebuked them, Hayls turned him to stone as he stood there poised to throw the harpoon, saying “You’ll be the boss for seals … from Sooke to Nanaimo.”

Cropped screenshot of photo of Tliwaynung cairn. Source: Burnt Embers blog, click to visit.

Chikawich – “McNeil Bay” (same blog post as above): To the east (left) lies McNeill Bay, called Chikawich, meaning “big hips”, where an early indigenous village was located.

Tliwaynung – “Kitty Islet” : the site of a Songhees camp that was associated with the main village site of Chikawich located further west in the bay. (ehpem asks for information on the archaeological content of this cairn – all I know is it was the site of a small excavation about 1980 under the general direction of Don Mitchell – and – to this day the introductory archaeology field trips at UVic make a visit here.)

Spewhung “Turkey Head”: included on the plaque are names for Chatham Island (Stsnaang) and Discovery Island (Tlchess).

Sitchanalth “Willows Beach”: The indigenous people called Willows Beach Sitchanalth, which according to Songhees elder Ned Williams referred to the drift logs and trees lodged in the sand. ehpem notes the proximity of this cairn to the property at the centre of the Esplanade controversy I mention above.

Sungayka “Loon Bay”:  Cadboro Bay was called Sungayka, meaning “patches of snow.” A village existed here in Loon Bay for at least parts of the last 1500 years. Qoqwialls, a game similar to lacrosse, was played on its shores, and berries were picked nearby.

Thaywun “Bowker Creek”: ehpem notes, “Bowker Creek and it’s salmon run are marked by a cairn on Cadboro Bay Road where Bowker Creek passes beneath it and Foul Bay Road. The cairn is crowded by a narrow sidewalk, businesses and parked cars. It, like Bowker Creek, is walled in and controlled by a modern world in a rush towards prosperity. In some ways this seems like appropriate symbolism for the Songhees First Nation way of life that has been heavily constrained by the settlement of their lands.”

Anderson Hill: People once sat here making stone tools, perhaps while watching for approaching enemies during warfare, or locating groups of sea mammals needed for food. Bulbs of blue camas, valued for food and trade, were gathered in nearby lowlands.

In a related vein, there is a good post on a Songhees history sign a Cattle Point, which includes a rather clever clickable PDF file whereby you can zoom in on the text content.

Clicking on any of the links above takes you to a short piece about each cairn, with photos and the text of the inscription included.  As I noted, there is also an excellent Google Map which shows each cairn’s location – and clicking on the map symbol reveals a picture and a link to the Burnt Embers page. This is a great portal to the cairns: ehpem has done a great service to Oak Bay by consolidating and documenting this excellent commemorative project, making it navigable to locals and accessible to the global community interested in the rich history and contemporary expression of Songhees and Straits Salish culture.  The blogging, in fact, is almost as impressive as the cairn project – which itself is one of the few such projects of explicit recognition of First Nations culture in the Victoria area. (See these posts of mine, for example, 1, 2).

The rest of the blog is also good value, containing some evocative pictures of local events such as Moss Street Market and, as advertised, the author’s surroundings including his blue gate and a complex construction of chain mail, using beer can pull-tabs.  It’s a diverse blog and well worth checking out for local history and beautiful photos.

Cropped screenshot of cairn at Spewhung, Turkey Head. Source: Burnt Embers blog. Click to visit.

Screenshot of Manis news from the website of the Center for the Study of First Americans. Click to go to page.

[October 20 edit: Manis article now out in Science, my post here.]

Quite a while ago I posted about some of the frustrations I felt about the Manis Mastodon site, near Sequim on the Olympic peninsula.  This 1970s find of a Mastodon skeleton had one singularly enigmatic feature: there appeared to be the broken tip of a bone point embedded in one of its ribs.  As I wrote before: yank that sucker out! – so we can determine for sure if this is a human made artifact dating to the same age as the Mastodon – about 14,000 years ago.  Being well pre-Clovis and right near the coast, this find would be of profound importance to our archaeological understanding of the first arrival of people into the Americas.  Now, as you can read above, there is an intriguing hint that Manis has finally been re-examined, and found to be a legitimate Pleistocene archaeological site. It’s real.  Wow.

Manis Mastodon rib with bone point protruding. Source: CSFA. Click for photo gallery.

It’s just a short note on a website, so some caution is still in order.  But the CSFA is a legitimate organization based at Texas A&M University, and is run by serious people.  The finding is reported as fact – no qualifiers in place!  I doubt it drifted onto their website by accident. The full text is as follows:

In 1973, a single mastodon was excavated on the Olympic Peninsula by Carl Gustavson [sic]. The mastodon remains were dated to about 14,000 years ago and the animal appeared to have been butchered by humans. No stone tools were found at the site, but one rib of the mastodon had a bone object embedded in it. Gustavson interpreted this to be a bone projectile point. For many years the evidence from this site has been debated. Using modern technologies-advanced AMS radiocarbon dating technology, high resolution X-ray CT imaging, and DNA and protein sequencing-we reanalyzed the evidence from the Manis site. This reexamination shows that the object is a bone projectile point and that the site is 14,000 years old. This provides unequivocal evidence of pre-Clovis mastodon hunting at the close of the Ice Age.

Now, I have not been able to find any other information on this.  Presumably they have an article submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.  Their language indicates they are very confident in the result though, and even the brief paragraphs suggests that a rigorous and multi-faceted analysis was undertaken. I emailed the center a week or so ago, but haven’t heard back yet – but then, neither did they yank the posting!

So lets consider it real for the time being.  The implications are enormous.  People were hunting Mastodon on the Northwest Coast some 1,000 years before Clovis – the purported first archaeological culture of the Americas.   It’s a major game-changer in how we think about the first peopling of the Americas, and about the roots of NW Coast Archaeology and the ancient presence of First Nations people in the Salish Sea.

A few other thoughts, point form, I don’t have time for beautiful prose:

1.  It makes the nearby Ayer Pond (Orcas Island) finds, thought to be a Bison antiquus butchered by humans some 13,700 years ago, seem even more likely to be real.  While each site must stand alone as an independent archaeological claim, we can’t completely ignore the context that two sites from roughly the same time period do mutually reinforce each other’s plausibility, at least rhetorically.

2.  The discussion in the previous post raised a point I have never seen mentioned before about Manis: the placement of the bone point near the spinal articulation strongly suggests the projectile was launched from above.  This kind of ambush hunting strategy, perhaps from rock bluffs or the like, would be a sensible one against large, dangerous animals and to my knowledge we don’t have evidence for it elsewhere in Pleistocene America. {edit: check out this image]

3. The use of bone technology for megafauna hunting is interesting in its own right.  We know bone points have superior qualities in some ways to stone ones: they are less brittle, and may be configured to be very narrow/sharp/cylindrical to offer less resistance to penetration, perhaps an advantage with such large animals – an ice pick to the heart which can slip between the ribs, so to speak.  Without wanting to extrapolate too much, it’s at least worth pondering  a low risk hunting strategy of aerial ambush with deeply penetrating weapons, followed by a long tracking process of a bleeding animal.  In the case of Manis, the animal actually escaped and lived for another three or four months, according to veterinarians.  But it would nonetheless be a good way to hunt, and stands in contrast to the kinds of images we usually have brought to mind: hunters bravely standing under a rearing mastodon, armed only with a spear, a loin cloth, and a callous disregard for their own safety.  I’d be on the bluffs, myself.

4. The bone point also brings to mind the tip of a bone point found in Gaadu Din  Cave 1, on Haida Gwaii, directly dated to about 11,900 years ago.  The only plausible reason for this bone point to be in that cave was as part of a winter-time bear hunting practice.  Again, organic technology was chosen for even the most demanding and risky tasks.  Bone technology is good technology: let’s give it some respect, and analytical love too.

5. I’m kind of glad that I never did get a chance to yank the sucker out – I probably would have used a leatherman and messed the whole thing up.  And maybe the lack of definitive analysis in the 1970s as was a good thing – there are more modern methods, better CT scans, smaller samples needed for carbon dating, new techniques in ancient protein and DNA analysis.  But if it had been definitive in 1979, say, around the time Monte Verde was first being published, then we might have been saved a few decades of the dying roars of the Clovis First model, with benefits to archaeology generally and with a headstart on the Pleistocene archaeology of the west coast.  Knowing there were people on the ancient landform breeds optimism and energy to go find their sites.  A lot of work could have been done in the interim.

But nonetheless – assuming this is real – there is no longer any excuse.  We must put in place a co-ordinated, focused and interdisciplinary effort to find and excavate more sites of this age, dating to the great Time of  Transformation as the last ice age came to an end.  We could do this in Haida Gwaii, in the Dundas Group, the Central Coast, the Salish Sea – it doesn’t matter.  It’s a target-rich environment! Pleistocene Archaeologists of the Northwest Coast: Start Your Engines!

Oh – and, 6. On the off-chance someone at the CSFA was inspired by my “yank it out post” then I am chalking another one up for this blog

And 7. Needless to say, if you know more about the CSFA report please let me know by email (qmackie @ gmail, or in the comments below)

edit: a little more on Manis at this post.

Manis rib undergoing CT scan in late 1970s. Source: CSFA. Click for photo gallery.

Bibliography:

1. Gustafson, Carl E.; Gilbow, Delbert; Daugherty, Richard D. (1979). The Manis Mastodon Site: Early Man on the Olympic Peninsula. Canadian Journal of Archaeology, 3:157-164.
2. Petersen, Kenneth L., Peter J. Mehringer Jr., and  Carl E. Gustafson 1983.   Late-glacial vegetation and climate at the Manis Mastodon site, Olympic Peninsula, Washington. Quaternary Research Volume 20, Issue 2, pp. 215 – 231.
3. Gaadu Din bone point date: Fedje, Daryl; Mackie, Quentin; Lacourse, Terri; McLaren, Duncan 2011. Younger Dryas environments and archaeology on the Northwest Coast of North America. Quaternary International, Volume 242, Issue 2, p. 452
4. A short account of the find is here.
5. Manis Mastodon at the Sequim Museum.

Manis Mastodon on display at the Sequim museum. Source: The Oregonian