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Archaeology
SFU Archaeology students work with Squamish community to preserve cultural heritage in local field school
SFU Archaeology undergraduate students returned to a local field school this summer in collaboration with the Squamish Nation, getting a sense of what it is like to work as consultants in cultural resource management.
“Once they graduate, many of our students go into the consulting world. On the field school we give them those real-world, hands-on skills,” says SFU archaeology professor Rudy Reimer, who facilitates and oversees the collaboration.
A member of the Squamish Nation, Reimer was approached by Squamish leadership several years ago to create a Rights and Title department to protect Squamish cultural heritage. Today, the department is fully operational and includes many SFU Archaeology alumni. The work students are doing over the course of the field school is also part of assisting the department with its efforts.
Fifteen years ago, a development project on Locarno Beach in Vancouver displaced forty trucks-worth of sediment containing 5000-year-old archeological material belonging to local First Nations.
“There are not just stone artifacts; there are bone artifacts. We have faunal remains that tell us about ancient diets and resources, and occasionally scattered human remains—ancestral remains,” Reimer says.
Half of that material was diverted to the Musqueam Nation, while the Squamish Nation took the other half to North Vancouver, where it has remained next to their administration building for more than a decade.
Over the past couple of years, archaeology students have managed to decrease the pile of sediment’s size by about a quarter while learning how to uncover, recognize, interpret and catalogue artifacts.
This year, a second component of the field school took place in Squamish, B.C., at a settlement site at the base of Stawamus Chief Mountain called Sta’7mes, where future developments will impact archaeological deposits.
Reimer not only grew up in Squamish and has ties to the area, but also did an excavation in Sta’7mes when he was an undergraduate student that uncovered material his students are still studying today.
“It’s kind of an ongoing legacy that I have, sort of feeling responsible for the cultural heritage of the ground where I grew up playing as a kid,” he says.
The field school replicates a project students would do while working for a cultural resource management company. They assess the site’s intactness, boundaries, depth and age while recovering artifacts that may date back to over eight thousand years ago. Through this work, they determine areas where project planners want to avoid and minimize impacts.
“We make those management decisions to say, ‘stay away from this area here, because you will disturb a burial ground,’ or, ‘you’re going to disturb very ancient artifacts and materials,’” Reimer explains.
When they encountered sensitive material, like ancestral remains, an Elder was there as a community liaison to take over and advise.
“That’s very valuable when working with Indigenous communities, to kind of surrender that control, because it’s the community’s cultural heritage,” says Reimer, who emphasizes the importance of including and listening to the community members that live their day-to-day lives there.
During the field school, they held an artifact show and tell, inviting Elders, community members and students from a local elementary school to come and learn about the important history beneath their feet.
Undergraduate students also worked side-by-side with technicians on site who, as members of the community, provided them with valuable cultural and landscape knowledge.
“We have academic knowledge going back and forth, and cultural knowledge going back and forth, and our students really got a lot out of that. They said it was quite unique in their university experience to be part of that,” says Reimer.
Recent SFU Archaeology graduate Evan Mugford shares his experience on the field school, which was his first archaeological excavation.
“What stood out to me most is the extremely dense and rich amount and diversity of ancestral belongings we recovered during our work,” Mugford says. "It was humbling holding something that you know hasn't seen the light of day since someone stood there and created it hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
When looking at a complex stone, Mugford has learned to see the process that went into creating it. "You can see where the stone was struck to work it into the desired shape, and often you can see that whatever was being worked on was thrown away because of an improperly placed blow, causing it to break and be discarded. I think that's awesome.”
Mugford graduated from SFU’s archaeology program in June, and with the experience he gained, has already been contracted to work with Cordillera Archaeology for the Kwantlen Nation to work on a project like the one in Sta’7mes.
“It is a mitigation project that requires us to excavate the area in order to get an idea of what kind of archaeological site is there, how large it is, and determine what archaeological features and material of value might be lost if the development proposal moves forward,” he explains. “It can be very hard to land a paid position doing this sort of work without experience, and the field school offered me just that.”
