Culturally Modified Trees of the Pacific Northwest: How do we define what is protected and not protected under the HCA in British Columbia.

Summary

In British Columbia, archaeologists are challenged with the task of identifying and recording Culturally Modified Trees (or CMTs) with some live trees dating back to the early seventeenth century. How these features are recorded as archaeological sites, are guided and managed by the BC Archaeology Branch under the Heritage Conservation Act (HCA). This provincial ministry is constantly changing departments, and sometimes change how they would like archaeologists to inventory and manage CMTs. Up until recently, archaeologists recording these features would document and include all CMT features in a cluster as one ‘site’, regardless of age, with varying feature types and ages, and a site was considered to represent continuous use of the landscape over time. More recently, the direction from the Archaeology Branch has been to not include CMTs that are more recent than AD 1846 in the recorded site boundaries, unless they happen to fall within the cluster of the pre AD 1846 features. Our paper will discuss the implications of this current direction, and how this potentially affects First Nations and their rights and title to the land.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage