Archaeology Blankets the Valley

In the Secwepemc calendar, September is called Pesqelqlélten, or “Many Salmon Moon”. It refers to the vast numbers of sockeye salmon that run up the Fraser and Thompson watersheds in the fall, heading for natal lakes and streams. For thousands of years, September was a time when extended families came together at key spots to harvest this food that has been central to culture and survival.

One such location is just upstream from Kamloops, close to where the LaFarge cement plant sits today. In Secwepemctsin, the place is a called Cyew’kwe, roughly, “where people fish with scoop nets”. Here, more than 1,500 years ago, Secwepemc ancestors began to build weirs: massive, permanent fishing infrastructure that would serve their families for generation after generation.

Weirs, or fish fences, are built to funnel fish to be trapped. They’re found all over BC where waters are shallow and relatively slow, and fish are known to school, pool, gather. Locally, the town of Barriere derives its name from the weirs noted there by French-speaking fur traders in the 19th century.

The weir at Cyew’kwe was strategically positioned in a part of the flow of the South Thompson River preferred by salmon. The wide opening of its V-shaped design faces downstream, so that returning fish enter it and are channeled into a narrow opening, where fishers wait with spears, baskets or nets. When no more fish are needed (or no more can be processed fast enough), the fish can flow through, carrying on unimpeded. It's a brilliant system, a beautiful example of sustainable landscape modification.

The archaeological site here is more than a kilometre long, and consists of almost 1,400 individually sharpened stakes. They're mostly pine, a few of Douglas-fir and birch (all grow nearby today).  Radiocarbon dating of wood from different parts of the structure shows it was in use, and continually mended and maintained, for more than 1,500 years. While the earliest radiocarbon dates from the site are around 1,560 years, archaeologists and Secwepemc people believe it was built much earlier, the earliest stakes having decayed long ago.

When the first stakes in this facility were sunk, the Secwepemc salmon industry was already wildly successful. For the preceding 3,000 years, technology and social systems formed around the unique blend of resources this landscape had to offer. Salmon, then as now, was an essential part of that existence.

The weir could provide all the food needed—and more—but the people turned that into an economic and cultural cornerstone.  Families were organized powerhouses, each fishing, curing and storing thousands of pounds of salmon every year. Surplus fish were stockpiled and traded in every direction, so this salmon wasn't only salmon: it became the cedar root and hemp and moosemeat and copper and abalone and buffalo hide traded by neighbouring nations. And later, iron and canvas, guns and glass.

Today, the evidence of intensive salmon processing at Cyew’kwe is spread across the exposed mudflats, along the shores, and up on the terraces above. At low water you can still make out the lines of wooden stakes pounded into the riverbed, the scattering of stone tools, and tons—quite literally—of hearth rocks spread along the shores.

It can sometimes be hard to articulate the depth of history, hard to express how Secwepemc people grew up hand in hand with this river. Here, it’s written on the land: the fish weirs, the processing stations, the pithomes that people returned to at night, bellies and caches full. Archaeology blankets the river valley, where families lived and worked together for millennia before contact. That's what time immemorial means.

Archaeobotany: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Plants

The profession of field archaeology at first may seem exciting and adventurous to some, but in reality most of the time this job involves hiking seemingly endless kilometers across difficult terrain or digging an infinity of small, yet deep test pits into hard, hard ground. And it is an incredible job to have. As someone interested in stone tools and starting out in archaeology, after digging what felt like thousands of shovel tests without a single stone artifact to be found I grew bored. So I occupied myself with plants! Obviously, plants are abundant and an easy distraction while in the forest. More importantly, knowledge of plant species is a good skill for a field archaeologist to have as certain types of plants can provide information about soil conditions and drainage at a particular location (e.g., horsetail in wet areas) or whether an area has been recently disturbed (e.g., thistle, mullein). These are often referred to as indicator species.

Typically, the study of modern vegetation is associated with traditional use studies that aim to document aboriginal land use patterns. However, field archaeology can at times be an importance source of traditional use information, especially where associations between archaeological site types (such as cooking features), and modern vegetation become apparent. While not totally conclusive, it is interesting when it is possible to associate ancient cooking features with an existing patch of a traditionally economically important plant such arrow-leaf balsamroot or wild mint.

The unique semi-arid environment of the Interior is more amenable to the preservation of buried plant remains than in more temperate areas of B.C. While there is no doubt that plants were important economic resources during pre-contact times, plants are rarely found in archaeological contexts, as organic materials simply decay too fast. One of the most common indirect kinds of evidence for plant utilization in the Kamloops area are small, round cultural depressions, with blackened charcoal-stained soil and fire broken rocks: the remains of ancient earth ovens. Since many of the important edible root species had to be cooked prior to consuming, people developed the technology of hot rock cookery. This involved digging a pit in the ground, filling the bottom with hot rocks, layering the pit with tree boughs before adding the roots and finally covering with soil. The roots would then slowly roast underground for up to two days before being dug up again for consumption or for winter storage. Radiocarbon dates obtained from these cooking features provide point to the considerable antiquity of hot rock cookery in the southern interior, with sites in the Kamloops area dating to as early as 7,000 years ago. These cooking features are found all across the landscape in various settings, sometimes in clusters of several hundred or as an isolated occurrence.

While the use of earth ovens declined in the contact period, traditional use information and ethnobotanical studies document the continuing importance of a wide variety of plant species to the Secwepemc people. In my time hiking through the forests and grasslands in the surrounding area, I have come to recognize a few culturally important plants and have learned a little of their past and current uses. With beginner's knowledge of only a few of the traditionally important plant species, one can start to see the forest for what it once was: the grocery store, the pharmacy, and the hardware store all in one place.