The Muck-Rakers

Text and photos by Philip Lambert, Curator of Invertebrates, RBCM

Imagine if you will, fourteen dump trucks lined up. Each one with 5 cubic yards of dripping, green muck oozing out of it. Your job is to shovel each truckload into a series of vats, heave each vat by hand, onto a waist-high, rectangular sieve, and wash the fine silt away with a hand held fire hose. As you do this, keep your eyes peeled, behind your mud-splattered glasses, for any live animals, shells, and most importantly, any potential human artifacts. Field work is often this way - tedious, repetitive tasks spurred on by the prospect of a major discovery or the contribution of some significant data to science. Why is it when my friends hear I am going on a cruise, I get that look, with the eyes looking skyward and a knowing smirk. I may be on a large vessel in an exotic place but it is not quite the cake walk my accusers imagine!

 

Bottom sediment awaiting sieving.

The possible major discovery, on this trip, is evidence of human occupation 10,000 years ago in a place that is now a hundred metres below sea level! During the last ice age much of the ocean was bound up in glaciers covering the mainland of British Columbia. Sea level was as much as 150 metres lower. The weight of ice depressed the coast range but pushed the Queen Charlotte Islands up, like a see-saw. The east coast of Moresby Island, or Gwaii Haanas, was an expanse of land stretching to within a few miles of the mainland. Archaeologist, Daryl Fedje of Parks Canada, has journeyed to Juan Perez Sound for the last few years in search of evidence that humans lived there, at a time when the common wisdom has it that people entering North America travelled via an ice-free route east of the Rockies. Daryl and others believe that North America was peopled by migration down the west coast. Unfortunately, most of the evidence for activities on the coast during that time period is now under the ocean.

 

 

With the help of geologist Heiner Josenhans of the Geological Survey of Canada, and some sophisticated scanning equipment, they obtained a visual image of the bottom of the ocean. Josenhans and his colleagues have also pieced together the geological history of the area and mapped the sea level changes over the time period in question. With those images in hand and an archaeologists trained eye, they picked out a number of sites where potentially, people might have lived. From the deck of the CCGS Vector the crew lowered a giant, hydraulically operated grab down to the ocean bottom and scooped a cubic yard of sediment each time. And this is where the sieving operation comes in. Among all those bits of gravel and shells we were looking for small stone “blades” that had been created by human hands many thousands of years ago.

You might wonder what an invertebrate curator from the Royal BC Museum had to do with this project. Well Parks Canada, in addition to the archaeology, is also interested in documenting the subtidal marine life within the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve boundaries. So our eyes were also peeled for living things as well. They funded my travel to collect benthic (bottom-dwelling) animals, sort and identify them, deposit the specimens in the RBCM collections for future reference, and make the data available to Parks. In 1998 we sampled 65 sites and collected 600 lots of specimens. In June 1999 we collected another 375 lots from 69 bottom grabs and 6 dredge hauls. Uvic co-op student, Jan Cowan, spent two terms in 1999 processing these collections. In addition, she has been able to scan our specimen collections for any records from Gwaii Haanas and enter them into our electronic database.

 
Sediment dwelling brittle star, Ophiura sarsii

One of our main tasks is to eventually enter all 45,000 records of invertebrates so that our holdings from any part of BC can be quickly retrieved and summarized. Outside funding such as this is helping us to achieve that goal. At present, only about a quarter of our collections have complete electronic records that include location, depth, and other useful information.

 

We acquired all sorts of marine animals for our collection, such as, spoon worms (echiuroids), sea cucumbers (holothuroids), tiny clams, worms of every kind, brittle stars, sponges, and much more. These will add to our knowledge of British Columbia marine biodiversity and help to describe the geographic distributions of individual species. When the information is finally digested there may even be some range extensions or new species.
 

Oh, and by the way, the team did find a human artifact in 1998 at a depth of 53 metres, that has since been dated at 10,200 years old. The 1999 collections built on that with a number of possible artifacts from the same area, although none so far have been verified. This evidence, plus more from workers on Prince of Wales Island on the coast of Alaska is a major step in supporting the hypothesis that coastal areas were used as stepping stones to the rest of North America. Very productive muck-raking, I think!

 

Article first published as: Lambert, P. 2000. The muck rakers. Discovery: News and events from the Royal British Columbia Museum 27: 4-5.