total weight of the boulders in this mound could not be estimated at less than 25 to 30 tons. To bring and place the boulders alone must have taken a number of men many days; and many more must have been consumed in bringing such large quantities of sand in their simple receptacles, and in digging the clay which caps the structure throughout its whole area to a depth of several feet.
Some of the mounds of the Vancouver Island group are pyramidal in form. Whether any of these latter ones were of that form originally cannot now be determined. Exteriorly they present the appearance of truncated cones rather than four-sided pyramids, but this may easily be due to time and the elements. The boulders, I may here state, found in these mounds weight from 25 Ibs. up to 200 Ibs. each and were apparently brought from some of the mountain-stream beds, no stone of any kind, not even a pebble, being found anywhere on the ranch. There are several of these streams a mile or so back from the river where they might have come from.
Plate IV: Section of Mound of Fourth Series.
Plate V: Plan of Mounds of Fifth Series.
In concluding my remarks I trust it may be conceded that the notes I have been able to gather show that the mounds and middens of British Columbia are worthy of the attention of archaeologists, and that we possess in them positive and reliable records of the antiquity and culture-status of the prehistoric tribes of that Province. That any degree of civilization higher than that manifested by the Haidas and their neighbours, the Tsimseans, has ever existed in that region, I think, is extremely doubtful, the evidence from the mounds and middens all tending to strengthen and corroborate what has been gathered from other sources, that the aborigines of the Northwestern Slope, from the Mackenzie to the Yukon and from that river to the Columbia, if not beyond, had scarcely emerged from primitive savagery and barbarism when Europeans first came in contact with them a little over a century ago.16
My best thanks are due to my friend Mr. Carlyle Ellis, of Vancouver, B.C., for his kind assistance in preparing the drawings for the plates accompanying this paper.
1 Reprinted, with acknowledgement, from Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 1 (1895) section II pp. 103–122. Since Hill-Tout was not at that time a member of the Society, G. M. Dawson “communicated” the paper to the meeting of 15 May 1895.
2 Hill-Tout had little else at his disposal but Boas’ report to the British Association for 1890, and was probably referring to “The Salish Languages of British Columbia” pp. 679–692. Here, Boas uses the Snanaimuq (Nanaimo) dialect for his examples, but he customarily uses the term Cowichan for the Hakomelem language as a whole.
3 Cyrus Thomas Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894).
4 Charles Borden in “Cultural History of the Fraser-Delta Region” (1970) was more definite: “The Fraser is constantly building its delta westward at a rate of roughly 1,000 feet in one century. As a result, a site like Marpole, which 2,000 years ago faced saltwater, now is more than 3.5 miles from the river’s mouth” (p. 97). Since the dates of the “Marpole Phase” are around 400 B.C. to 450 A.D., Hill-Tout’s dating is not out of line. (He was, of course, writing sixty years before the first carbon-14 dating was done in this area.) Donald H. Mitchell “Archaeology of the Gulf of Georgia Area” (1971) pp. 61–67 discusses chronology, with a section on sea fluctuation.
5 I have not found a discussion of these matters in Sir John Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization (1870). The fact that Hill-Tout errs in the title of the book probably indicates that he was writing from memory. Lubbock discusses Worsaae, Steenstrup, and the Danish middens in chapter 6 of his Pre-historic Times (1865) – but the closest he comes to Hill-Tout’s quotation is the phrase “immense antiquity” on p. 196.
6 The Port Hammond stone bowl is pictured in Smith Shell-Heaps of the Lower Fraser (1903) p. 184, and in Duff “Prehistoric Stone Sculpture” (1956) p. 145, with discussion on p. 69.
7 Dr. G. E. Kidd, Professor of Anatomy at Queen’s University, who retired to Vancouver and was part of the Marpole dig of 1930, discusses such a skull in “A Case of Primitive Trephining” in The Great Fraser Midden (1948) pp. 19–21. Smith writes about this headache treatment in “Trephined Aboriginal Skulls” American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1924).
8“Vide Seventh Report on the Northwestern Tribes of Canada of the British Association, 1891” — Hill-Tout. In his summary of types on p. 447 of that report, Boas proposes an “homogeneous population on the coast of British Columbia, with the exception of the region of Dean Inlet. It is characterized by a cephalic index ranging between 77 and 81.” In a recent survey, “The Cephalic Index: the History of an Idea in Physical Anthropology” (1976), B. Raymond Druian states that it is “impossible to determine the ultimate cause for head shapes to differ in the ways they do and the cephalic index will continue to be primarily of historic interest” (p. 182). See discussion of the two skull “types” in the Introduction, above.
9 For Hill-Tout’s discussion of Thompson jade and methods of cutting, see volume I of the present edition under the Archaeological section of the 1899 report.
10 A letter from G. M. Dawson to Hill-Tout, in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia, mentions that Deans assisted Richardson in the geological survey of Vancouver Island. An account of their opening a mound in 1871 is given by Deans in “The Antiquities of British Columbia” (1892) pp. 41–43.
11 “Since the above was written the writer has learned of the existence of another group farther south near the boundary line” – Hill-Tout. See also the “Archaeology” section to the 1902 report, below. Frederick T. Lazenby has a short account of the 1894 Hatzic dig in Smith and Fowke Cairns of British Columbia (1901) pp. 60–61. On p. 61 of that volume Smith reports on several cairns and skeletons found at Point Roberts. See Hill-Tout’s Monuments of the Past (1933) for mention of the Hatzic and the later Harrison River digs.
12“Vide Dr. G. M. Dawson’s ‘Notes on the Shuswap,’ 1891” – Hill-Tout. On p. 11 Dawson states what is also true of the Hatzic mounds: “The Indians now residing [in the area] have no knowledge of the people who were buried at this place.”
13 “Longfellow’s Legend of Hiawatha. Prof. Cyrus Thomas in his paper on the mounds in the States in the report previously referred to speaks of a custom which prevailed very extensively among the mound-builders of the northern districts of removing the flesh of the dead bodies before final burial and burning it over the grave when this took place. It is possible these fires were lighted for a similar purpose” – Hill-Tout. On the burying of slaves, Hill-Tout refers us to Morice “on the Dene” in the Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, 1892–93. This would be his “Notes Archaeological, Industrial and Sociological on the Western Denes”; but I have failed to find the specific reference.
14“Vide Sixth Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the Northwestern tribes of Canada [1890, pp. 647–655] “ – Hill-Tout. In the letters to Boas (in volume IV of the present edition) Hill-Tout requests a judgement from Boas, but Boas determined that the skull was not unique: ”The skull had been deformed in the same manner as is practised by the present Indians. . . . What little remains of the face indicates that its shape resembled the face of the present Indians of this region” – quoted from “Remarks on a Skull from British Columbia,” a note by Boas appended immediately after Hill-Tout’s paper, on p. 122 of the original printing. Hill-Tout’s reaction to this may be found in the “Archaeology”
