Ancestral Landscapes of the Salish Sea: Exploring Inland Shell Middens, Social Memory and Coast Salish Narratives

Summary

This paper will explore indigenous and archaeological ways of understanding "inland shell middens" in the Salish Sea on the Northwest Coast, British Columbia, Canada. Archaeological evidence suggests inland shell middens represent depositional practices that may have embodied new strategies of social memory and ritual practice beginning in the Marpole Phase (2400 to 1200/1000 calBP). To move beyond the deeply-plumbed Northwest Coast ethnographic literature to interpret the archaeological past, ethnographic research will draw upon dialogues with descendant Coast Salish peoples today about how their ontologies, cultural beliefs, values, lived experiences and daily practices associated with the ancestral dead and non-human beings and ancestral objects powerfully shape Coast Salish understandings of their own settlement history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Applying Indigenous Frameworks for Archaeological Analysis and Interpretation

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15430