Hakai, a magazine about coastal things, reports on the remarkable archaeology project that has been going on for the last twenty years around Comox harbour on British Columbia's Salish Sea. What the researchers are recording and analyzing are the remains of long buried stakes -- there may be 200,000 of them around the Courtney River estuary -- that still mark out the shapes of an enormously elaborate set of fish weirs. They comprise "the largest unstudied archaeological feature yet found on the Pacific Northwest coast" and testify to "an immense, highly coordinated, and sophisticated fish trap system, the largest such system discovered in North America, if not the world."
The whole article is worth reading, but the basic takeaway is of the richness and sophistication of the societies that live along the British Columbia coast before epidemics and colonization swept them away barely 150 years ago.
