8 Ancient Places in British Columbia That Still Raise Questions

In the fall of 1990, land was being cleared for a proposed housing subdivision on the eastern edge of Mission, British Columbia. Sitting on the property was an enormous boulder that developers reportedly considered removing. But when archaeologist Gordon Motes examined the site, he recognized that the stone was far more than a construction obstacle. It was haitam, a sacred transformer stone preserved in Stah-Lo oral history. Excavations beside it would uncover a village occupied roughly 5,000 years ago, halt the subdivision, and begin a decades-long effort to return the property to Stah-Lo stewardship. These are eight ancient places in British Columbia where archaeology has uncovered extraordinary evidence, but not always the complete story. Haitam, Mission, British Columbia Motes, at the time the archaeologist working directly for the Stah-Lo Tribal Council, did not need to run any tests to know what he was looking at the moment he saw the boulder. Stah-Lo oral history had always identified a large stone near this stretch of the Fraser as a place where three sea yam, or leaders, had once been turned into rock. According to that tradition, the transformation was carried out by Salish. We as Coast Salish, we didn't live in teepees. The figure credited across Stah-Lo territory with shaping both the physical landscape and its moral order. The three leaders had been asked to share a gift with their people, in some tellings the gift of writing itself, and had refused. For that refusal, they were transformed where they stood. And the stone that resulted is still understood to hold their shu-li, their life force. Not as a symbol of it, but as the thing itself. Geologically, the boulder is what is known as a glacial erratic, carried into the Fraser Valley and deposited by the ice sheets that once covered the region. That much is settled. Once Motes flagged the discovery, the province stepped in, and archaeologists began excavating the property under Stah-Lo direction in 1991. What they uncovered beside the transformer stone was more than a curiosity attached to an unusual boulder. It was a rectangular pithouse floor, part of one of the oldest known dwelling sites anywhere in British Columbia. And by 1992, the excavation had recovered more than 30,000 individual artifacts. Among them were pieces of obsidian that had traveled here through trade networks, stretching as far as present-day Oregon, ochre and paint stones used for decoration or ceremony, small gaming pieces, and salmon vertebrae still packed into what had once been a living floor. Beyond the trade goods and ceremonial objects, the excavation also turned up the ordinary residue of daily life at the site. Fire-cracked rock from cooking hearths, processed salmon bone, consistent with an economy built around the annual salmon runs, and tools used for working hide and wood. None of it is exotic on its own. Together, it describes a settled community returning to this part of the riverbank across many generations. Living within sight of a stone, their descendants would still be able to identify by name 5,000 years later. The federally designated habitation site dates to roughly 5,000 years before present. Some interpretations place the excavated dwelling between approximately 5,300 and 5,700 years old, while other cultural material found nearby has been cited as evidence that people used the broader area much earlier. None of those numbers resolve the deeper question the site actually raises, and that question has nothing to do with radiocarbon results. The Stalo treat the stone itself as a transformed ancestor rather than a symbol standing in for one. Archaeology can date the sediment sitting around it with real precision. It cannot date, and was never built to explain what the stone itself is understood to be. Following the discovery, the provincial government began a process to transfer the threatened parcel of land into Stalo Governance, compensating the original developer for the cancelled project rather than displacing the archaeological find. The site was formally designated a National Historic Site in 1992, though the full 18-acre property was not transferred to the Stalo Heritage Trust Society until 2006. The Stalo went on to build and now operate the Haydum Longhouse Interpretive Center directly on the site, welcoming visitors to a place that very nearly became somebody's driveway. The name Haydum is generally translated as sudden transformation, tying the place itself directly to the history preserved there. Slocan Valley, British Columbia Roughly 400 kilometers east of Haydum, deep in the West Kootenay region, a valley just over 100 kilometers long, runs between the Valhalla and Slocan mountain ranges. Just north of Lemon Creek, on the banks of the Slocan River sits a village site that has produced some of the most precisely dated peat house archaeology anywhere in the British Columbia interior, and a story about an entire nation that Canada once declared, on paper, did not exist. The Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village is among the most thoroughly excavated pithouse sites anywhere in the British Columbia interior. Dr. Nathan Goodale of Hamilton College and his colleague Alyssa Nauman have co-directed archaeological research and field schools at the site since 2009, building on survey work that began back in the year 2000 under researchers from the University of Montana and the University of Lethbridge. Radiocarbon dating across close to 40 separate house pit depressions has revealed four distinct periods of occupation at the site, stretching from roughly 3,105 years ago all the way into the late 1700s. One pithouse in particular, 23 meters across, is the largest structure of its size class ever documented anywhere in the entire interior plateau, and at somewhere between 2,600 and 2,700 years old, it is substantially older than other known house pits of comparable size in the interior plateau. Bone tools carved from beaver digits recovered at the site date back 3,000 years on their own. Evidence suggests some houses were deliberately burned, possibly as part of periodic rebuilding, that removed decayed or insect-damaged timbers so the same spot could be used again. The occupation record then breaks off. Somewhere between roughly 2,500 and 2,000 years ago, occupation at Sloca Narrows appears to have stopped almost entirely, for reasons the archaeological record does not spell out. Goodale has suggested this may connect to a wider crash in regional fish populations that has been documented elsewhere along the British Columbia coast during roughly the same period, but whether that is actually what emptied Sloca Narrows specifically, rather than something else entirely, remains unconfirmed. This valley belongs to the Sinaixt, whose name translates to People of the Place of the Bull Trout, though the Tunaha, the Shekwepema, and the Sea Ilk also claim territory that overlaps here. And the more recent history of the Sinaixt in this valley involves one of the most consequential bureaucratic erasures in Canadian Indigenous history. In 1956, following the death of a woman named Annie Joseph, the last Sinaixt person still registered under the Indian Act inside Canada, the federal government formally declared the Sinaixt extinct as a people and struck them from the Act entirely. This happened even though Sinaixt descendants continued to live south of the border and maintain their identity, history, and connection to their traditional territory in British Columbia. In the summer of 1989, a road-building crew working near the small settlement of Vallican, further down the Slocan Valley, unearthed human remains while clearing ground for a new stretch of highway. Because the Sinaixt were, on paper, officially extinct, Canadian authorities did not think to notify anyone connected to them. Word eventually reached Sinaixt families at the Colville Reservation, and community members traveled north to establish a camp at Vallican that held for months, refusing to leave the site until the remains of their ancestors were returned to them rather than shipped off to a museum in Victoria. Sinaixt elder Yvonne Swan, who helped coordinate the effort on the ground, later explained that she had taken on the role because the community's elders had specifically asked her to, and that a request like that from her own elders was not something she felt she could refuse. The province eventually relented, and the road was rerouted around the burial ground. The campaign led, in 1990, to what is widely described as the first successful repatriation of ancestral remains by an indigenous group in British Columbia. More than 60 sets of remains have since been returned through the relationships the camp helped establish, and the Sinaixt continue to occupy a sacred village site at Vallican today. The federal designation was never neatly reversed by a single administrative announcement. Instead, the Sinaixt forced the legal system to confront what that designation had ignored. In 2010, Richard Desautels, a member of the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes, crossed into British Columbia and harvested an elk near Castlegar. He then reported the hunt himself, creating a test case over whether the Sinaixt retained Aboriginal hunting rights in their traditional Canadian territory. The case was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada in October of 2020. On April 23, 2021, the court ruled in Desautels' favor, confirming that an indigenous community located outside Canada could still hold Aboriginal rights protected by Section 35 of the Constitution. Sixty-five years after Canada had declared the Sinaixt extinct for the purposes of the Indian Act, the country's highest court recognized that their constitutional rights had not disappeared simply because an international border separated them from their traditional territory. Farther west, another ancient site would become the center of a very different struggle, not over land, but over something removed from it, Uquat, Nutka Island, British Columbia. On the southwest coast of Vancouver Island sits Uquat, a village whose name translates to Friendly Cove, and which for centuries stood as a center of Nuu-chah-nulth whale hunting. Nuu-chah-nulth whaling itself stretches back at least 4,000 years, and at the ceremonial heart of that practice once stood a structure known as the Whaler's Shrine, a ritual washing house containing 88 carved human figures, four carved whales, and 16 human skulls arranged inside it. Whaling chiefs used the shrine to carry out purification rites known as u-su-mich in the days before setting out to hunt. Successful whaling was never treated as a matter of skill alone. A whaling chief prepared for weeks beforehand through fasting, bathing in cold water, and ritual isolation, all aimed at securing the whales' cooperation before a harpoon was ever thrown. The shrine functioned as the physical center of that preparation, a place set apart from the rest of the village where a chief could carry out the final stages of purification immediately before a hunt. The shrine's exact use turns out to be more contested than it first appears. Earlier French accounts from the early 1800s, including one written by a ship's surgeon named Yves Thomas Vimon, who was traveling with the explorer Camille de Roquefeuille, describe visiting this stretch of coast in detail, but make no mention whatsoever of the skulls or other human remains later described by Franz Boas and Philip Drucker at the turn of the 20th century. Whether that gap reflects an actual change in practice over the intervening decades, an incomplete earlier account, or later embellishment by the anthropologists who came after, is a question that has never been fully settled. In the early 1900s, an ethnographer named George Hunt photographed the shrine and negotiated its removal with two men identified as having authority to sell it, on the specific condition that it be removed from the village while everyone else was away on a sealing expedition. Franz Boas acquired it on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History and it was shipped out of Nootka Island in 1904. The anthropologist Aldona Jonaitis later wrote what remains the definitive account of the shrine's removal, and researchers including Harry Whitehead and Aaron Glass have since directly criticized the salvage ethnography methods Hunt and Boas used to acquire it in the first place. Some historical images associated with the shrine have also been misidentified. One frequently reproduced photograph of Hunt in ceremonial dress was later identified as depicting a Kwakwaka'w ceremony rather than a Nuu-chah-nulth one. The shrine sat in New York for more than 120 years. In April of 2024, the Mowachat Muchalot First Nation, led by hereditary Taiyee Hawi, or Chief, Mike Moukwin'u, filed a formal request for its return. The transfer became official on March 25, 2025, at the American Museum of Natural History. The shrine's carved components were returned, while the 16 ancestral remains associated with it were repatriated under a separate process. They were later welcomed home at Uquat's Summerfest celebration that August. Chief Moukwin'u said the nation had been wanting the shrine home for many years, and it had finally arrived. The nation has chosen not to place it on public display. After more than a century in a museum collection, its future will now be determined by the people to whom it belongs. NASS VALLEY, BRITISH COLUMBIA About 80 kilometers north of Terrace, the Nass River Valley contains one of the youngest volcanic landscapes in Canada, a vast field of hardened black lava produced by Tiax Cone. At some point in what geologists could once only place vaguely within the last few centuries, the Tiax volcano erupted. According to Nisga'a oral histories and later historical accounts, the eruption killed approximately 2,000 people in the space of a few days. For a long time, western science could not pin down when this had happened with any real precision. Nisga'a had preserved a far more specific account. The Nisga'atawak, their sacred oral histories, describe the eruption in specific, consistent, and repeated detail across generations. According to the Atawak, children had been tormenting spawning salmon in a way that angered the creator, and scouts stationed on a ridge called Genu Aksut watched the disaster begin before the lava ever reached the villages below. The Atawak name three specific villages destroyed in the event, Laxalux, Laxseewiljest, Tsutsap. Researchers have argued that the reference to spawning salmon may place the eruption during the seasonal salmon run. Because these were established fishing communities, that timing may also help explain why so many people were remembered as being present along the river when the disaster began, and why the death toll is remembered as having reached into the thousands within only a few days. In 2020, Dr. Glyn Williams-Jones of Simon Fraser University, working alongside colleagues including Yannick Lemoine and Nathalie Viguereau, published radiocarbon, paleomagnetic, and geochemical results in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. Their results supported the conclusion that the deposits formed during one eruptive episode, and placed that episode between 1675 and 1778 at the 95.4% confidence level. Two years later, Lemoine and colleagues modeled the physical dynamics of the disaster itself in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science, showing that the lava traveled roughly 20 kilometers down the valley in fast-moving currents and reached the villages in as little as one to three days from the moment the eruption began. Before starting the research, Williams-Jones felt it necessary to personally reassure the Wilpwill-Koskwa-Nisga'a Institute, the Nisga'a House of Wisdom, that he was not arriving to tell them their own history was wrong, the scientific work did not replace the Adawak. It supplied a second line of evidence for a disaster the Nisga'a had already preserved in detail. Standing in the lava field today, the ground still looks freshly torn open in places, black and cratered in a way that makes 250 years feel much shorter than it actually is. The park protecting the site carries the formal name Nisga'a, and it was established in 1992 as the very first park in British Columbia to be jointly managed with a First Nation from the outset, an arrangement formalized further under the Nisga'a Treaty in the year 2000. An interpretive center built in the style of a traditional longhouse now sits near the edge of the lava field, presenting the Adawak alongside the geological evidence. Kitsilas Canyon, Skeena River, British Columbia, near Terrace. A dramatic gorge cuts through the Skeena River here, home over time to as many as six ancestral Gitsilasu villages, including a fortified settlement called Gitloxok that stands as one of a kind anywhere along the north coast. Within the canyon lies a specific location known to archaeologists as the Paul Mason site, and it may hold one of the earliest known formally arranged villages on the northwest coast. Ten rectangular house floors sit side by side in two neat, deliberate rows, all of them facing the water, dating to just over 3,000 years old. Archaeologist Gary Coupland, whose doctoral research at the University of British Columbia in 1985 examined the site in depth, has written that these house floors represent one of the earliest known examples of a formally arranged village anywhere along this stretch of coast. Some archaeologists have interpreted the similarly sized houses as evidence of a relatively egalitarian community. Others argue that the two-row arrangement may already reflect differences in status. The same village plan has therefore been used to support almost opposite conclusions. Coupland has acknowledged that ranked societies most likely did develop somewhere along the northern coast sometime between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, but that clear archaeological proof of precisely when and how that shift happened remains difficult to pin down even now. The village presents another problem. The carefully planned settlement at Paul Mason appears to have lasted only a generation or two. Across the wider region, other communities were also abandoned between roughly 2,000 and 1,500 years ago, possibly connected to a period of intensifying warfare between neighboring groups. Why a community would go to the trouble of building something this deliberate and organized only to walk away from it so quickly afterward remains unclear. Excavated hearths at the site show a diet built overwhelmingly around salmon, suggesting the community had already developed the storage economy needed to support a settled village, which makes the short lifespan of that settlement even harder to explain away. Paul Mason was not an isolated settlement. Coupland's excavations traced a succession of villages through the canyon, extending back approximately 5,000 years. Communities repeatedly shifted within the gorge, but the unusually formal Paul Mason layout appears only briefly in the middle of that much longer record. The name Gitsulasu itself means people of the canyon in Simalyak, the Tsimshian language. Tsimshian history is carried forward through the Adak, their sacred true tellings, including a text called Men of Merik, recorded by Walter Wright, which describes successive waves of arrival into this territory from both the interior and the coast. That oral record lines up closely with the archaeological picture of migration and intermarriage that researchers including Andrew Martindale have worked directly with Tsimshian communities to weave into the modern interpretation of the site. Stein Valley near Lytton, British Columbia. West of the town of Lytton lies the Stein River Watershed, the largest unlogged watershed remaining anywhere in southwestern British Columbia, and home to one of the densest known concentrations of pictographs in Canada. Hundreds of red ochre pictographs cover the cliffs throughout this valley, and while individual images are often esoteric on their own, the deeper puzzle here centers on why this much painting happened in one place at all across what appears to have been an extended span of time. Inkla-Pama tradition holds that these images record dreams and visions received during ceremonial fasting, a practice sometimes described as writing dreams onto the rock so they would remain there permanently. That framework draws on the knowledge of Inkla-Pama elder Annie York, whose interpretations of Chris Arnett's drawings of the pictographs were recorded by Richard Daly and published in 1993 in a book titled They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever. Arnett's later research complicates the assumption that all of the paintings belong to a remote prehistoric past. He argues that many of the images visible today may have been created or renewed during the centuries surrounding European contact. Some may belong to earlier phases, while others appear connected to the social and spiritual disruption caused by introduced disease. The paintings may therefore preserve not one period of activity, but several very different moments in Inkla-Pama history, less like a single prehistoric gallery and more like a record repeatedly added to during periods of crisis and change. Precise dating remains difficult, regardless of which interpretation applies to a given panel, since there is still no reliable scientific method for directly dating rock art of this kind anywhere in the region. Stein Valley was added to Canada's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status in 2017, although it has not yet been inscribed as a World Heritage Site. The name Stein comes from the Inkla-Pama word stagin, meaning hidden place, at a specific location within the valley known as Asking Rock, travelers are still expected to formally request safe passage before continuing any further upstream. The park protecting this entire watershed was established in 1995 following a sustained campaign in which the Inkla-Pama fought alongside environmental groups throughout the 1970s and 80s to stop industrial logging from the valley at all. Some specific pictographed locations within the Stein remain deliberately undisclosed by the community to this day, protected not by law but by silence. Gabriola Island, British Columbia. A short ferry ride from Nanaimo, Gabriola Island contains approximately 120 known petroglyph images, one of the highest concentrations found anywhere in British Columbia, pecked directly into soft sandstone bedrock. Across the entire British Columbia coast, roughly 300 petroglyph sites are known to archaeologists in total, and fewer than 30 of them can be dated with any real confidence at all, even approximately. Estimates for the specific carvings found on Gabriola range anywhere from around 1,000 to as much as 5,000 years old. Among the best known images are figures commonly called the Thunderbird and the Seawolf, the latter combining features associated with a wolf and a marine animal. In 2010, archaeologist Brian Gordon tested the soil beneath the Thunderbird and Seawolf carvings for fragments of sandstone, pigment, tools, and other debris that might help establish when the images were made or renewed. The experiment showed how researchers might date activity around the carvings, but it did not produce a simple creation date for the images themselves. What the carvings were originally meant to do is still debated among researchers today, with theories ranging from storytelling and formal ceremony to markers used during vision-seeking or even physical records of past disasters like major floods. The site belongs to the Sinunimo First Nation. Elders Ellen White and Bill Seward have described the carvings as places people went specifically to seek out and receive spiritual power, with the small pitted marks surrounding many of the larger figures interpreted as points of access into that surrounding power. Elder Geraldine Manson, who also goes by the name Sa-Sia, has written directly about these sites in a book titled Sinunimo History, written in places and spaces, and has been clear that petroglyph-making among her people is not a closed chapter belonging only to the distant past. It continues today as a living practice rather than a preserved relic of one. Beginning in 1996, the Gabriola Museum created replicas of 39 images with Sinunimo permission, allowing visitors to see the designs without directing traffic toward the vulnerable originals, most of which sit on private land today and remain undisclosed to the general public. The final site is harder to reach than all the others, because the landscape it belonged to no longer exists above water. Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. Off the coast of Haida Gwaii, somewhere within Hecate Strait and Juan Perez Sound, an entire ancient landscape sits drowned beneath roughly 120 meters of open ocean. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels along this stretch of coast were as much as 150 meters lower than they stand today, which means the beaches, the campsites, and the travel routes once used by the earliest people to reach this coast are now almost entirely underwater and effectively unreachable by any conventional means. This search is closely connected to what archaeologists call the kelp highway hypothesis, the idea that the earliest people to reach the Americas traveled south along the Pacific coastline by water rather than on foot through the interior, following dense kelp forest ecosystems that ran continuously from Alaska down through the islands of British Columbia. If that theory holds, most of the physical evidence for it, ancient beaches and potential campsites associated with that migration route, is sitting exactly where the Haida Gwaii research is looking, underwater and extraordinarily difficult to investigate. Dr. Quentin Mackey of the University of Victoria, working alongside Dr. Daryl Fedje, has spent years methodically searching this drowned landscape using an autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with side-scan sonar, mapping terrain that has not seen open air in well over 10,000 years. The sonar work itself moves slowly and methodically, running long parallel transects back and forth across the seafloor, building up a picture of the drowned terrain one narrow strip at a time, the same way a lawnmower works across a yard rather than photographing it all at once. Nearby, on dry land, Haida Gwaii sites, connected to the same broader research program, have been dated to roughly 12,700 years old, showing that people were already living on these islands as the ice age itself was drawing to a close. At a depth of approximately 122 meters, the sonar survey recorded an alignment of stones that Mackey and Fedje's team considered unusual enough to investigate as a possible human-built feature. One possibility under consideration is a stone fishing structure associated with an ancient shoreline. If it was built before that landscape was submerged, it could be more than 13,000 years old and among the oldest fishing structures ever documented anywhere on the planet. Mackey has connected this entire search directly to Haida oral tradition, specifically to accounts describing what is remembered as a time of transformation, a period in which the physical landscape itself was understood to be actively changing around the people living through it. Western geology, working from ice cores and sea level curves, arrived at the same basic picture from an entirely different direction. A coastline in genuine motion at the end of the ice age, rather than the fixed and unchanging backdrop it appears to be today. But the sonar image alone cannot establish who placed the stones or whether anyone placed them at all. Until the alignment is examined directly and its geological setting is fully understood, it remains a candidate archaeological feature rather than a confirmed fish weir. Suggestive enough to raise the question, but not clear enough to answer it. These sites do not show that archaeology has failed. They show where its limits begin. A radiocarbon date can tell us when a house was occupied. Sonar can reveal a pattern on a drowned seabed. Neither one can fully recover what a place meant to the people who lived there or replace histories that were already being carried outside the archaeological record. The other ancient sites videos on this channel explore more places where Canada's archaeological record is still changing. Thanks so much for watching. Hopefully I will see you in the next one.