lurqer-
in the event that you are lurking
this truly is an amazing story:
An amazing, true B.C. fish story
An archeology student takes a walk on the mudflat of Comox Bay and discovers a sophisticated, industrial-scale fishing system that far pre-dates European contact on the West Coast
Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, October 02, 2004
COURTENAY - In the fall of 2002, on one of those grey West Coast afternoons with a sullen sky threatening rain, university student Nancy Greene decided to go for a walk.
Greene, who was born in Victoria in 1948, had returned to school as a mature student and was busy surveying dry scientific literature on archeological research in the Comox Valley for a Malaspina University-College course. She had been pleasantly surprised by the work of Katherine Capes, who impressed her as "possibly the first Canadian woman archeologist" and certainly as one who blazed trail in a profession where female scientists were once rare.
Capes, who worked with the national museum in Ottawa almost half a century ago, would come home to the valley for summer vacations and take her family on research digs. One of the important sites she had excavated was on Mallard Creek, not far from where Greene lived.
So on this dreary day, the archeology student rounded up her husband, David McGee, and sloshed down the creek -- partly in homage to her predecessor, partly out of curiosity over the original excavations.
Greene remembers that the tide was exceptionally low and had receded more than a kilometre from the shoreline. Before them sprawled the vast mudflat of Comox Bay, stippled with pools of water, patches of weed and clam shells.
What she'd expected to be a gooey expanse proved firm and the two soon found themselves hiking the tidal flats, something they'd never done before.
Greene noticed odd, knob-like bits of driftwood protruding from the mud. The more she looked, the more she saw -- dozens, then scores.
She stooped to examine one. The top had rotted but below the surface the wood had been preserved. It looked like it had been driven vertically into the seabed. It looked man-made. She discerned something that nobody else had apparently noticed in a century or more -- the knobs of wood were in parallels.
"She saw these stakes arranged in lines and that great big light bulb went on inside her head," David said with a grin as his wife reached for a good description of her epiphany.
Greene realized they were looking not at flotsam but at evidence of human engineering. Not only that, the scale appeared enormous. Everywhere she looked, she saw clusters and concentrations.
"I saw stakes everywhere -- everywhere -- just everywhere I looked. The more I saw, the more I realized that this was vast. I didn't even know what to call them," she recalled. "I didn't know they were called alignments. But I realized its potential importance as an archeological site. My major concern was maintaining the integrity of the site and the artifacts."
With that in mind, she decided that for her undergraduate project in archeology at Malaspina she'd map part of the site, locating each of the stakes, recording its position and, if possible, determining its age.
It proved a far bigger task than she'd ever imagined.
What she was looking at, it turns out, was evidence of what could prove the largest prehistoric architectural feature on the West Coast.
"This is a major discovery," Greene said. "There is nothing else like this on the Northwest Coast. It is highly sophisticated."
There are fish traps elsewhere, but these stakes appear to be part of an industrial-scale complex of that once covered at least four square kilometres. The series of barriers, corrals and interconnected passages placed to exploit the rise and fall of the tides suggests the presence of prehistoric experts responsible for designing, constructing, operating and maintaining the facility.
She realized that just to map the exposed portion of the site would require mastery of sophisticated surveying equipment and that, since sea water covers the entire site most of the time, opportunities to work would be limited to the small windows at low tide.
It was an ambitious undertaking. She had no research funding, no equipment, no stature as an archeologist and few of the technical skills that would be necessary for locating and mapping the spatial and temporal distribution of the artifacts.
But Greene says she's never been one to shy from a challenge.
"I didn't know that I couldn't do this. I didn't know, so I just went out and did it," she said. "I assumed all the cost. We had to buy a new computer. We had to learn all these new programs."
However, Greene discovered she had indispensable resources -- friends and a community that values its cultural history like few others of its size. Her husband helped out, her kids helped out. About 12 civic-minded volunteers cycled through her mapping project.
Among them were Steve Mitchell, a professional surveyor who volunteered crucial expertise and specialized equipment.
There was Mike Trask, an amateur paleontologist famous for discovering the West Coast's first fossil elasmosaur, a long-necked fish-eating marine reptile from the Cretaceous period. Gay Frederick, her supervisor at Malaspina provided scholarly guidance. Al Mackie, a provincial archeologist helped with the paper work necessary in obtaining the designation that would protect Comox Bay as a registered archeological site.
"Oh," Greene said, "there were so many who helped me. Linda Hogarth from the Campbell River Museum, Kitty Birnick, a specialist in wet site archeology and Eric Forgeng who helped with the language necessary to work with this data."
One key supporter was the Comox Band Council which, to its lasting credit, recognized immediately the importance of what had been found. The band provided funding for expensive carbon-14 dating at a special laboratory in Florida.
This technology determines age by measuring the remains of a radioactive isotope found in organic material that decays at a constant rate. The oldest of the 11 stakes tested was a piece of hemlock dating from more than 1,200 years ago, the most recent from about 175 years ago.
Dee Cullon, in charge of archeological liaison for the Hamatla Treaty Society, which includes the Wewaikay of Cape Mudge, the Weiwaikum of Campbell River, the Kwiakah, the Tlowitsis and the K'omoks on whose territory the find is located, points to the significance for aboriginal title.
The discovery appears to provide strong evidence of a continuous economic exploitation of a major renewable resource reaching back to an era long before any known contact with the European culture that now predominates.
There is also a tantalizing hint in the historic record. John Walbran's landmark study of B.C. place names says the headland enclosing Comox Bay was named Punta de Lazo de la Vega by the Spanish explorer Jose Maria Narvaez in 1791. He translates the term loosely as "the point of the snares on the plain" which might be a reference to extensive fish traps.
Since proof of habitation and resource use before 1846 is one of the critical legal tests applied to any assertion of the rights that flow from aboriginal title in British Columbia, whatever this find may mean for the enrichment of heritage or for the advancement of scholarly knowledge it may ultimately have even bigger implications in the political and legal arenas.
None of that crossed Greene's mind at the time. She was fascinated and excited by what she saw but was still not sure exactly what she was dealing with.
Her work consisted of obtaining a Global Positioning System unit that reads precise locations on the earth's surface by triangulating the terrestrial position with satellites in stationary orbits and then charting and recording the locations of clusters of stakes.
The immensity of the project soon made itself clear. She had soon identified 213 concentrations of stakes. But when she set about locating each stake in just 11 of those concentrations, Greene found she had charted 11,009 individual stakes. Which meant she was looking -- a conservative estimate -- at perhaps 200,000 individual stakes for the whole array she'd so far identified.
Once she began transferring the locations to virtual maps, she found the images revealed patterns that the naked eye couldn't discern in the field. Immense heart-shaped patterns, others that looked like chevrons, patterns apparently layered upon other patterns over time.
One thing is obvious: This fisheries management complex was capable of supporting a lot of people and it's going to prompt anthropologists to rethink their estimates of pre-contact population densities on the coast.
For now, however, Greene, who graduated with a bachelor's degree this year, says she's looking forward to the winter weather, which will impose a well-earned rest.
In the off season she can turn her mind to finding grants for continuing research, often a difficult task when you're not associated with an academic institution.
shume@islandnet.com
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