----- Original Message -----
From: Doug Kelly
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 8:45 AM
Subject: Vancouver Sun - "Treasure beneath our feet HISTORY I Musqueam are
quietly negotiating a deal to protect a 3.5-hectare midden and village



Treasure beneath our feet
HISTORY I Musqueam are quietly negotiating a deal to protect a 3.5-hectare
midden and village site in south Vancouver

Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun


Saturday, November 17, 2007


An archeological management plan is being negotiated by the provincial
government and Musqueam First Nation to protect the site of an ancient native
midden and village at the south foot of Granville Street.

The first of its kind in B.C., the deal will apply to any future development of
23 properties on the Great Fraser Midden in Marpole, a 3.5-hectare (8.5-acre)
area roughly between Granville and the Arthur Laing Bridge.

A midden is a garbage heap, often rich in artifacts. The area was declared a
National Historic Site in 1933 and is estimated to be at least 2,500 years old
and possibly as much as 9,000 years old.

Thousands of tools, weapons and carvings of stone and bone were removed from the
midden during excavations in the 1890s, including the trappings of a royal
burial.

The archeology branch, which is drafting the agreement with the Musqueam, says
urban development is the biggest threat to the site and its ancient contents.
Vancouver property owners were notified of the negotiations by letter in June.

Archeologists working on the deal would not answer questions directly, but in an
e-mail response said the plan is intended to balance the interests of the
Musqueam, property owners and archeologists.

Musqueam treaty negotiator Leona Sparrow did not respond to requests for an
interview about the impending deal by publishing time.

The mechanisms for control of development on the midden site are still under
negotiation, but since the announcement of Premier Gordon Campbell's "new
relationship" with first nations, a blueprint for consultation is beginning to
emerge.

This past June, Tourism Minister Stan Hagen signed a memorandum of understanding

with a coalition of six first nations in the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island
that gives the natives an expanded role in deciding whether to allow development
on known archeological sites. There are at least 1,000 identified sites in
Hul'qumi'num treaty group territory, many of them containing human remains, much
like the Great Fraser Midden.

Government archeologists believe many artifacts remain in the Great Fraser
Midden, which is officially marked by a stone cairn in Marpole Park.

Though the city and archeology branch keep the locations of identified sites
secret, Grant Keddie, archeology curator at the Royal B.C. Museum, believes that
policy allows trophy collectors to search with impunity. Urban sites in
particular are better protected when they are well-marked, he said.

"People who live around the sites that are known do protect them," Keddie said.
"If someone so much as sticks a shovel in the ground in Victoria, I get a phone
call."

When the Great Fraser Midden, now usually called the Marpole midden, was
identified by Charles Hill-Tout in 1891 it was among the largest of it kind and
garnered headlines around the world. The midden was on the edge of a budding
industrial town called Eburne Station. The area was renamed Marpole in 1916.

The archeological treasure trove, first uncovered by a road crew extending
Granville Street in 1889, is extensively described by the city's leading
anthropologists and archeologists in a scientific tract published by the
Vancouver Art, Historical and Scientific Association in 1948 (cover price 25
cents).

Artfully carved stone bowls and statuettes, "expertly crafted" arrowheads and
tools made of stone and bone, and the remains of 100 people were found
throughout the site, originally measured by Hill-Tout at about two hectares (4.5
acres). Hill-Tout measured the heap of shell fragments and other detritus at 500
metres in length and 100 metres wide at a depth of five metres in many places.

Estimates of the midden's age vary widely, but artifacts and tons of shells
discarded by natives were deposited along what would have been the north bank of
the Fraser River between 1,000 and 5,500 years ago.

Some Lower Mainland native sites have been dated at 9,000 years old. The
Egyptian pyramids at Giza were built about 4,500 years ago.

Two astounding finds were recorded in excavations of the site. The first was a
two-metre-high pyramid, or cairn, made from river rock and topped with a 20-kg
stone statue. Inside the pyramid were human bone fragments packed with orange
sand. Its straight-edged square base was aligned perfectly with the points of
the compass.

The second find was the skeleton of a male encased in sheets of beaten copper,
with a copper crown on his head. The remains of two women with smashed skulls
were part of this elaborate grave.

At the lowest -- and most ancient -- level, human remains with a long skull
shape were found, people physically distinct from the first nations residents
living in southwestern B.C. today. T.P. Oxenham Menzies, curator of the City
Museum from 1925 to 1953, said those remains could be 10,000 years old and
represent a completely different and more ancient wave of migration than the one
that brought today's Coast Salish people to the area. His ideas are in dispute
today.

The Vancouver Museum houses 4,500 objects recovered from the Marpole midden,
according to Lynn Maranda, the museum's curator of anthropology. It is likely
that many more remain.

In places like Marpole, where roads and parking lots have been built, the most
ancient levels of the midden may still be undisturbed, Keddie said.

"The top metre or so may be destroyed, but the oldest stuff is still intact and
is actually protected by the pavement," Keddie said.

Keddie has tried, with limited resources, to create public educational displays
at B.C. archeological sites only to see them repeatedly vandalized, though he
finds it hard to believe that people would tolerate such attacks or
trophy-hunting at similarly ancient sites like Stonehenge or the pyramids at
Giza.

"The Glenrose Cannery site [in Surrey] is known to be at least 8,000 years old
and it could have been developed into a centre of learning and a tourist
attraction," Keddie said. "We see this kind of thing in other parts of the
world, but there really isn't much awareness here of how important these places
are."

Bridge construction in Pitt Meadows just last month uncovered broken digging
sticks with wapato (Indian potato) bulbs more than 4,000 years old, the first
evidence that local natives farmed that crop in antiquity, Keddie said.

"In a few months, because the builders have a contract and a completion date,
that will all be under asphalt," he said.

rshore@...

© The Vancouver Sun 2007




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