Peoples of the Fraser Midden HAT is the link between the family that died 20,000 years ago in a cave at Choukou- tien, China, and the people who. lived by a vanished estuary of the Gulf of Georgia perhaps as long ago as the close of the ice age ? é Who were the people that Carved the prehistoric stone bowls which have been found —a very few of them—over an area from Saanich to Kam- loops? And what link is there between them and the Mayan People of modern Mexico, Hon- duras and Guatemala whose ancient culture was already in decline at the time of the Spanish Conquest ? The answers to these ques- tions may lie hidden in the Great Fraser Midden at Mar- pole. The Great Fraser Midden is hot a recent’ discovery. What IS new is the discovery made by Dr. Charles E. Borden of the University of British Columbia nm excavation this past sum- mer. He uncovered the foun- dations of a great log house built by a prehistoric Indian beople around the time of the Oman conquest of Britain. Carbon tests of charcoal taken from the site give an age’ of 1900 years. For Dr. Borden it was a race -88ainst time. The site he ex- Cavated with a volunteer crew Was a single lot at the foot of South Granville Street. This and an adjoining lot to the east; Ong occupied by old homes, Were to be built upon. Two Other lots to the east of this Were for sale. And two other lots to the west, still under bush, were held by the city. These six lots, three of which are now under option to a hotel . Company, constitute the largest - ‘Temaining section of one of » ‘the oldest archeological sites “I the country. °° ». The evidence of ancient cul- : tures -uncovered.,by Dr. Borden 8nd earlier excavators is at once 8n indictment of past govern- Mental indifference in allowing .SO much of the original’site to be destroyed and a_ strong €fgument for saving what lit- le is left. When I went there last week I found half a dozen boys busily digging a skeleton from the banks of a bulldozer excava- ‘tion’ which has largely ruined One lot for scientific purposes. agerly they showed me some of the artifacts they had found. At least what they knew about the midden put to shame the score or more people, at- tracted by newspaper publicity, Who’ stopped their cars and Came over to ask questions. “There are always people Stopping by,” a man who Worked with the UBC volun- teer crew said to me. “Most of them are genuinely inter- €sted and some would like to help, if they knew how. But Some of the boys — yes, and Adults too, have ripped boards off the university excavation €nd dug around.” Then he told me how com- Munity organizations had ob- “/8ined the lumber and covered € university excavation in an ‘effort to protect it against just Such vandalism. ow the Marpole community °rganizations have formed a By HAL GRIFFIN Great Fraser Midden Founda- tion with the idea of acquiring two lots and .preserving them. At the same time, the Van- couver Art, Historical - and Scientific Association has ap- proached Vancouver Parks Board to set aside a lot on which it can conduct systematic excavation. * Middens — the word comes from the Scandinavian, mean- ing refuse heap — are to be found the length of the Pacific coast. What distinguishes the Great Fraser Midden is_ its original extent and its antiquity. It was accidentally discovered in 1902 by workers cutting a road through the virgin tim- ber toe Marpole. They began turning up skeletons and arti- facts in such number that. they excited the curiosity of Charles Hill-Tout, then at the begin- ning of a career which was to establish him as one of the greatest anthropologists. \this country has produced. Hill-Tout recognized that the workers had stumbled upon an ancient midden. He persuaded a mining engineer, G. F. Monck- ton, to survey it and its outline was traced over 4.5 acres. Its great age was proven by the firs and cedars, some of them close to 1,000 years old, with their roots deep in the midden, growing on the two feet and more of topsoil that had accum- ulated since it was abandoned. But what puzzled Hill-Tout was why the ancient people should have established their campsite six miles from salt water. His wonder grew as other midden sites were dis- covered even higher up the Fraser River. Study of geological surveys and river currents — finally solved the mystery. When the midden was being built up by the accumulation of clam + and mussel. shells, slowly over the centuries to a depth of 15 feet in some places, the salt water came up as far as the present city of New Westminster. Sea Island, now separated from the midden site only by the width of the river channel, did not exist. The river was only beginning to lay down the huge deposits: of silt from which Lulu Island was formed. The people of the midden looked out upon the unbroken expanse of the Gulf of Georgia and gathered an abundant har- vest of shellfish from the tidal flats immediately bélow their village. Seized with the importance of the discovery, Hill-Tout tried to interest various bodies in making excavations. Lead- ing anthropologists confirmed his own researches and his lec- tures aroused wide public in- terest. But always he was told there was no money. Little by little, private build- ers encroached on the midden site. Amateurs, often with more zeal than knowledge, did their own excavating. Much of what they found might other- wise have been lost, but its value was diminished because they were not trained to note the position and level of their finds. Finally, in 1930, the Vancou- ver Art, Historical and Scien- tific Association scraped to- gether sufficient funds to undertake systematic excavation. What it uncovered made arch- aeological history. * As the workers dug their trench to the bottom of the midden they bared evidence of two distinct cultures. The people of the top level were broad-headed like the present day Indians. They had come long after the first people abandoned the site, occupied it for centuries and abandoned it in their turn when silting up For thousands of years jade from Hope, Yale and other parts of the Fraser Canyon was Andy Charles, 22-year-old Native Indian from Mas- queam Reserve, was one of the volunteers who helped Dr. Charles Borden in his excavations at the Great Fraser Midden this summer. of the estuary some 2,000 years ago destroyed the tidal flats. Beneath two feet of topsoil and eight feet of shell workers found the skeletons of a young Indian chief, his wife and a slave slain to accompany him in death, corroded green orna- ments of copper, prized above all things, still around their bones. Centuries before, a medicine man, using only stone imple- ments, had performed a trep- KeeEE prized by the Indians for making axes, adzes and chisels. This picture shows the canyon above Yale where lapidaries now hunt the rare rock. hining operation — opening a hole in the skull to relieve brain pressure—on the young chief. Two holes in the skull revealed the story. A first operation had been immediately success- ful, for one hole showed evidence of. healing, but the young chief had died during the second. -Four feet down in the shel} the workers came upon a carved stone image perched atop .a four and a half-foot pyramid, the. corners of which faced the four points.of the compass. Fhe sides of the pyramid were faced with rounded stones and fragments of human bone were found among the orange sand within it. Were these the same people who carved the bowl, its ser- pent motif reminiscent of the Mayas, dug ‘up ‘at’ Websters Corners in 1920 by Arno F. Skytte. A similar bowl was taken from the midden. Others have been found ‘at Yale and Lytton. But the Indians them- selves know nothing of the vanished people that carved them. : : The oné clue’ to’ their origin is provided by a single carved bowl recovered from the frozen muck at Nome in 1900. When T. H. Ainsworth, cura- tor at Vancouver City Museum, obtained a replica of this bowl two years ago he wrote to the Canadian embassy at Moscow. Had any similar bowls been found in Soviet Asia ? he asked. Apparently none has yet been found. But Ainsworth, now slowly assembling a col- lection of the bowls, believes that eventually the origin of the bowl-carvers will be traced to Asia. * The most significant dis- covery was made in the lower level of the Fraser Midden. Continued on Next Page PACIFIC TRIBUNE — OCTOBER 28, 1955 — PAGE 9 i .