Changing Ecologies and Altered Landscapes: A 13,500 year Paleoecological Record from Galiano Island, British Columbia

Summary

A high-resolution lake sediment core recovered from Shaw’s Bog on Galiano Island provides a window into the paleoecology of the island and region back to the Late Pleistocene. The extensive time depth represented offers an opportunity to evaluate ecology and climate prior to the known arrival of people in the southern Gulf Islands. It also provides a mechanism to measure impacts on the local ecology following the establishment of major, long-term village locations such as Dionisio Point and Montague Harbor in the later Holocene. Using fossil pollen, charcoal, and phytoliths identified in the core, we compare natural and potentially anthropogenic changes in the local and regional ecology and fire regimes of Galiano Island. Changes in charcoal frequency and morphology demonstrate shifts in fire frequency and fire regimes during the Holocene, and these are evaluated with respect to variability in the pollen and phytolith record. These paleoecological data, coupled with archaeological evidence for long-term landscape construction at nearby village sites, suggest that Salish peoples engaged a complex and dynamic landscape that both sustained and reflected increasingly place-based lifeways in the southern Gulf Islands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17086