Heiltsuk First Nation village among oldest in North America: Archeologists

[Judi Lynn]

RANDY SHORE
(Vancouver Sun)
Published: March 26, 2017
Updated: March 27, 2017 7:49 PM


A Heiltsuk village site on B.C.’s mid-coast is three times as old as the Great Pyramid at Giza and among the oldest human settlements in North America, according to researchers at the Hakai Institute.

The excavation on Triquet Island has already produced extremely rare artifacts, including a wooden projectile-launching device called an atlatl, compound fish hooks and a hand drill used for lighting fires, said Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student at the University of Victoria. 

The village has been in use for about 14,000 years, based on analysis of charcoal recovered from a hearth about 2.5 metres below the surface, making it one of the oldest First Nations settlements yet uncovered. Dates from the most recent tests range from 13,613 to 14,086 years ago.

“We were so happy to find something we could date,” she said. What started as a one-metre-by-one-metre “keyhole” into the past, expanded last summer into a three-metre trench with evidence of fire related in age to a nearby cache of stone tools.

More:
http://www.theprovince.com/heiltsuk+first+nation+village+among+oldest+north+america+archeologists/13207628/story.html

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Sifting Evidence with BC's Ancient Civilization Sleuths
For people roaming 10,000 years ago, the Central Coast was a great place to settle down, as excited researchers are proving. Part of a series.
By Jude Isabella 30 Oct 2012 | TheTyee.ca

. . .

The landscape looks like a giant's bonsai garden. Gnarled trees twist out of the boggy ground; a shallow pond sits in what's left behind of the giant's footprint. The image grows more fantastical when a group of men glide into the picture hauling a canoe, another two trudge through carrying plywood, and a third lopes by shouldering a ladder.

Archaeology on British Columbia's coast is never dull. In this instance, the group is following Duncan McLaren, a University of Victoria (UVic) archaeologist preoccupied with the past of this remote and soggy place, costly to reach and formidable to researchers used to milder landscapes. But it's also a rich place, where the buried past presses close to the surface, evidence of a people's home since the end of the last glacial period over 11,000 calendar years ago.

The discipline of archaeology has traditionally viewed the islands and fjords of the Central Coast as a corridor to somewhere else, imagining it as the route out of Asia to the Americas, speeding travelers on their way to what would become California, Texas, and southern Chile -- a faceless service area on the turnpike heading south.

McLaren belongs to a group of scientists with a different perspective. Their question is not the familiar "Where did people come from and where did they go?" Rather, it's, "How did the people live here so well?"

More:
https://thetyee.ca/News/2012/10/30/Archaeology-on-BC-Coast/

[Warpy]

1. Fascinating. I know Taos Pueblo has been dated back over 800 years

by tree rings in some of the roof timbers, but it's likely to be far older than that.

The PNW would have been a garden of plenty compared to Taos. That there were permanent settlements going back many thousands of years is no surprise at all. People who came here were far from stupid. If they saw territory that afforded them a good quality of life, they stayed there. Only when the area became overpopulated did people tend to strike out for new territory, either along the coast or into the interior.

The same pattern existed in much of Europe. DNA analysis of the 9000 year old skeleton dubbed Cheddar Man in England demonstrated that a lot of people in the region carried his mitochondrial DNA. Kennewick Man was found to be distantly related to tribal people in the area now, and has been repatriated and reburied. The idea that all people wandered around and ended up far from where they started is not one that holds up under examination. Many people moved in and stayed and their descendants are still around.