Cultural Forests of the southern Nuu-chah-nulth: Indigenous bark tending on Vancouver Island

Summary

Culturally Modified Trees are British Columbia Canada's most common archaeological site type. Data related to these indigenous forest management sites have been collected for a few decades now through CRM work in the area, though little research has encorporated this archive. My MA thesis focuses on creating regional chronologies of bark stripping and logging dates for the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, to better understand forest usage and population dynamics around the contact period. In addition to data collected from consultant reports many dates have been collected from recent old growth clear cuts in the field. This work has shown that roughly half of all dates collected from field contexts can be found within ancient cedar trees that have healed over and hidden their cultural scars, effectively making the oldest age class of CMT's invisible to archaeological consultants and thus unrecorded/protected prior to industrial logging. The dates collected in field contexts are found to be more representative of the full range of cultural modifications on cedars over the trees full lifetime. The oldest recorded living CMT has also been found on this project, dating to 1108 years.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage