Building Islands on the Northwest Coast: Intertwined Histories of Cultural and Geomorphological Landform Development at Garden Island, Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Some of the most immense anthropogenic shell-bearing archaeological sites in North America are located in and around the Prince Rupert Harbour, on the northern coast of British Columbia. The largest ancient villages have shell deposits upward of 10 m deep and over a hectare in area, resulting from a combination of intentional landform engineering and quotidian accumulation over millennia of occupation. In this densely occupied landscape, the Indigenous occupants transformed shorelines as part of long-unfolding acts of place-making that in turn shaped the social and political landscape of the region. In this paper we explore one of the area’s most iconic (but underreported) archaeological sites: Garden Island (GbTo-23). First excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, the island is essentially constructed entirely of human-deposited shell and is in a very strategic location within the harbor. We compile archival archaeological information with newly collected field data to reconstruct the site’s development within the context of geomorphological and cultural histories unfolding around Garden Island. We demonstrate how people manipulated Northwest Coast coastlines to the degree of literally building islands, and explore how in the modern context of climate change these locations are washing away in the absence of continued human occupation and maintenance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37685.0