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Temporal and Spatial Analysis of Salish Rock Painting

Chris Arnett

Accession Number Interviewer
Date Location
Media mp3
ID

314_Chris-Arnett_Salish-Rock-Painting_2012.mp3

otter.ai

8.02.2024

no

Outline

    Grants for archival preservation and local history talk.
  • Historical Society seeks grant to convert archives' water-based sprinkler system to a dust-based system to protect irreplaceable materials.
  • Chris Barnett shares local history and insights on First Nations cultural settlement in the Gulf Islands.
    Indigenous rock painting in the Sinai River Valley.
  • Dr. Speaker 2 discusses their PhD research on the spatial and temporal analysis of Salish and rock painting in Washington and southern British Columbia, foregrounding indigenous perspectives.
    Indigenous culture and history in British Columbia.
  • Speaker 2 discusses their research on the Stein River Valley in British Columbia, highlighting its cultural and historical significance to the Atacama people.
  • The speaker describes the area's geography, including the river's flow and the surrounding mountains, and notes the absence of roads and the presence of ancient Aboriginal trails.
  • Speaker 2 explains how ancient Aboriginal routes in BC follow the placement of rock paintings, which are connected to the sign "Stein assign" meaning "hidden place" or "hide."
  • The mountains now referred to as "Indian colleges" were where people went for training, including Satnaam (shamans/healers), and the supernatural beings believed to have visited the area left traces of their passing in various spots, including tiny footprints on rocks.
    Preserving Indigenous culture and history through archaeology.
  • Speaker 2 discusses their research on the Stein Valley, highlighting the cultural and historical significance of the area, including the transmission of traditional knowledge from elders to younger generations.
  • Speaker 2 describes their involvement in a wilderness campaign in the 1980s to preserve the Stein Valley, emphasizing the close call they faced in preventing the area from being eroded and logged.
  • Elder shares knowledge of traditional teachings and symbolism before passing away.
    Indigenous rock paintings and their significance.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the origins of the paintings, with some made by individuals like "club," "shoe," and "canoe," who were trained in the wilderness and received sacred songs for healing.
  • An Aboriginal student in Kamloops experimented with traditional red ochre paint, creating faded designs on a boulder after leaving it in the rain for several months.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the significance of red ochre paint in indigenous culture, highlighting its protective qualities and connection to dreams and visionary experiences.
  • Speaker 2 provides examples of red ochre paintings on rocks, faces, and garments, and explains their symbolism and the role they play in indigenous religious and spiritual practices.
    Rock art and its significance in Canada.
  • Shaman painted anthropomorphic figures on cliff faces in Canada within last 500 years.
  • German botanist discovers rock paintings in British Columbia, 1887.
    Early anthropological studies in British Columbia.
  • Franz Boas, a German anthropologist, led the Jessup North Pacific expedition in 1897 to study connections between Asia and the Pacific Northwest.
  • Charles Hill, a local writer from Abbotsford and Vancouver, joined the expedition despite not being invited, and contributed valuable insights despite being less intellectually rigorous than the other team members.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the history of the Stein Valley Rock Art Reserve in British Columbia, including the work of early scholars like Chuck Smith in the late 1800s.
  • The speaker highlights the unique acoustic properties of the reserve, including echoes and strange sounds that can be heard in certain locations.
  • The speaker reflects on the cultural significance of the reserve, including its use as a place for young people to train in traditional teachings and receive visions and ideas about their role in life.
    Indigenous rock art and its interpretation.
  • Analyzing paintings in Canada, speaker compares original drawings to modern-day versions, highlighting changes over time.
  • Elder shares knowledge of traditional Kwakwaka'wakw art and its symbolism through drawings and commentary.
    Indigenous rock paintings in British Columbia.
  • Early researchers documented Stein River Valley rock paintings, including similarities across different areas.
  • Speaker 2 discusses a manuscript from the 1980s that provided valuable information about the Stein River Valley's rock paintings, including the significance of the paintings' orientation towards a large rock formation.
  • Speaker 2 highlights the importance of understanding the cultural context of the paintings, rather than just focusing on their materiality.
  • Speaker 2 describes a cliff with paintings of giant faces, and notes the site's acoustic features that create unusual sounds.
  • Speaker 2 conducted archaeological excavations at the site in 2009, recovering pigment from the paintings and organic materials for dating.
    Ancient rock shelters with limited finds.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the significance of rock shelters, including their restricted, specialized activities and the importance of studying the reduction process of tools.
  • Excavations at a rock shelter near Ashcroft revealed low to moderate sediment accumulation, small quantities of fire-altered rock, and minimal flora and fauna remains, indicating short-term activities.
    Indigenous toolmaking and rock painting techniques.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the materials found at an archaeological site in British Columbia, including glass and quartzite, which are not typically associated with indigenous toolmaking in the region.
  • The discovery of these materials suggests that people in the area were producing tiny tools and experimenting with new materials, potentially for artistic or ceremonial purposes.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the artifacts found at a rock shelter, including leftover paint ingredients, ochre, acorus, and small seeds.
  • Speaker 2 uses a microscope to examine bulk soil samples and finds even smaller artifacts, highlighting the importance of paying attention to small details in archaeological excavations.
  • Speaker 2 discusses a new technology for enhancing images of rock paintings, allowing for better visibility of paintings on a north-facing slope that is often inundated with water.
  • The speaker uses the D correlation stretch software to enhance images of paintings located up to 50 meters up the cliff face, revealing details such as the size and location of the paintings.
    Analyzing rock art using D correlation stretch technique.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the process of analyzing a cliff painting, using technology to connect the dots and reveal the image.
  • Speaker 2 highlights the intriguing aspects of the painting, including multiple episodes of painting and a double-headed serpent image.
  • Speaker 2 describes a unique double-headed serpent rock art image found in British Columbia, Canada, with one head having a mouthful of teeth.
  • Speaker 2 explains how D correlation stretching has revolutionized rock art analysis and reveals the significance of quartz to indigenous people.
    Ancient rock art preservation and enhancement.
  • Speaker 2 observes a well-preserved panel with iconography, including two-headed snakes and grizzly bear paw prints, which are protected by calcium carbonate.
  • The D correlation stretch brings out various game animals and other interesting iconography, including a body and a head surrounded by circles.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the significance of the "D stretch" technique in analyzing ancient rock art, which allows for the enhancement and preservation of images from the past.
  • Speaker 2 highlights the unique pattern of multiple artists creating similar images in different locations throughout the BC interior, indicating a practice or inheritance of techniques.
    Ancient rock paintings in North America.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the complexity of analyzing rock art paintings, mentioning the challenges of deciphering the meaning behind the images and the potential for multiple episodes of painting.
  • Speaker 2 highlights the importance of digital enhancement in analyzing the paintings, noting that it provides a more objective perspective and can help to tease out details that may be obscured by the natural deterioration of the rock face.
    Indigenous knowledge and archaeology.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the discovery of ancient paintings in caves, highlighting their unique features and the importance of preserving them for future generations.
  • Speaker 2 shares their fascination with a particular painting, featuring a snake with multiple heads, and notes the use of the rock face as a guide for the artwork.
  • The speaker discusses their research on indigenous rock art in Canada, specifically the interpretation of images as prophecy and the fusion of indigenous and Western perspectives.
  • The speaker's supervisor, Dr. Andrew Martindale, coined the term "federated knowledge" to describe the combination of indigenous and Western knowledge systems, emphasizing political equality and collaboration.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the differences between Western and indigenous cultures' approaches to the past and future, highlighting the importance of incorporating spiritual beliefs and practices into understanding the world.
  • Indigenous cultures believe that the physical realm is a manifestation of the spiritual realm, and that seeking answers in the spiritual realm can lead to success in the real world.
    Dating methods for ancient paintings.
  • Speaker 2 is working on dating methodology, specifically carbon 14 dating, which is the standard archeological dating method.
  • Dating paintings is problematic due to the lack of carbon in the paint, and contamination is a significant issue.
    Indigenous rock art and its significance.
  • Speaker 2 describes finding a cave with rock art 2.5 km up in the Alpine, with paintings at face level along trails and some higher up, likely reached by climbing.
  • Speaker 2 plans to run radiocarbon dates on the stratigraphy to determine the age of the art, with potential dates ranging from the 1790s to the early 20th century.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the purpose of pictographs, mentioning their magical qualities and the belief in a network of communication between the creator and the subject matter.
  • Speaker 3 shares a song related to the shaman's journey into the wilderness, highlighting the importance of nature in their culture.
    Indigenous rock art in British Columbia.
  • Elders warned against looking at ancient paintings in the area, which are believed to be spiritually prepared for certain individuals.
  • Speaker 1 thanks Nancy and Susan for goodies and Chris for questions, while mentioning an upcoming meeting with the Hedge family.

Unknown Speaker 0:00
But he wants to.

Speaker 1 0:15
Order this is our January meeting. Welcome to a new year is happy and healthy New Year to all of you. And we look forward to seeing you in our other programs as well as the one we have today a little bit of correspondence. I'm a letter as coming indicating that the provincial Historical Society conferences in Campbell River this year, if any of you are interested in going up there, that's the provincial organization. She is you quite well attended and a good program. And I haven't hoppy here if anybody's interested in seeing what's being offered. Also a letter we have from Canadian Heritage, we applied for grant vote seven or eight months ago and got turned down. So we applied again. And we got a letter back saying that they would accept our grant at this time, and we will go through the process. So we'll see what happens. This is to provide some relief funding for the library in the archives area of the library, because right now they have a water based sprinkler system going into the archives, and we're trying to get enough money to convert it to a drive a system dust system, because water, of course, was destroyed. And we're not worried if the place will burn down. But false alarms or accidental set officer, something along that line could do irreparable damage to the Archives collection. So we're hoping to get that that money. Our financial statement is on the sidewall just beside the calendar there. It's right up to date. And social shows that we're still surviving and still economically viable as a group. We get grants from various people to run our archives. The barber grant is the one we get so far is the one that's allowing us to digitize many materials, we right now are digitizing all of the old drift woods, we're up to about 1980. Now, I think started in 1964, or a 64. So they're all online at the Saltspring archives.com. If you want to look back and they're searchable, you just go to whatever year you want, put in your name and see if your name was mentioned that or whose name was mentioned. And it's quite interesting, because in those days, they used to put a lot more personal news in about people, rather than they do nowadays. So you can, you know, find out weddings and all the people that were there, the bridesmaids who got stopped by the police for a $15, traffic ticket and all those sorts of things. So that's interesting to read the drift. By the way, I did get stopped for $15 traffic. That was my first and only traffic ticket. And we used to have RCMP on the island called Fred Rhodes. And he used to, they used to call those Rhodes scholarships, because everybody, everybody who came to the island got a ticket within about three weeks, I need to give you a lecture and tell you to slow down and that was the last you'd ever see him. But it seemed to work at the time anyhow. So that was a little bit of local history of today's talk is, is Chris Barnett is going to talk to us today. He has been a friend of ours for a long time and does excellent research and does lots of work and is always prepared to come forward and share some of this, his adventures with us. I don't want to get into too much. But I would just say that he is a field person he likes to get out into the field he likes to go to date, because he likes to be part of the archaeological studies of the Gulf Islands. He knows a lot about it and other parts of BC. And he works at UBC, you're still working at UBC as part of your your ongoing education and so on. And he is becoming well known in this field of First Nations cultural settlement. So Chris, having said that, I'd like to welcome you to our program today and turn it over to you.

Speaker 2 4:10
Thank you, thanks for turning out on this beautiful day, first, beautiful day of the year, maybe the second or third. Anyway. Yeah, it's really great to be here. And I'm going to talk about something completely different than my usual subjects. Usually I'm talking about something in the Gulf Islands. But I thought today I would share with you my PhD research at UBC and Department of Anthropology. And I'm doing a tour of a temporal and spatial analysis of Salish and rock painting. Read sort of figure up their rock painting and I'm just looking at a you know, broad area of Washington and southern British Columbia and just looking at the phenomena of rock painting and just trying to get a handle on it. So spatially and temporally, like where it is and when it appeared in time. But the The unique thing about my work, I think, is that I'm foregrounding indigenous perspectives indigenous knowledge in the in my research, so I don't start I mean, I'm very interested in science and an archaeological science particularly. But I'm also I believe in what we call a federated knowledge. So I don't, you know, sort of privilege Western science over indigenous interpretations or perspective. So I'm going to share some of this with you today. I got a lot of slides we're gonna get right into it. So the subject of my talk into a coma rock painting in the Sinai River Valley. influx hotma is the name of a of the indigenous people that should use a pointer anyway. Live sort of in this area. I don't know. This is not a great map, but I think you can see Washington state here. Do you want to use us? Sure. Okay. Here we are, then. Vancouver. Yeah. Here we are in Salt Spring Island, Vancouver, the Fraser River. And this is the area I'm going to be looking at this place I've been working in for about 25 years. The Stein river valley right up here and this is listen, and the air, the region of the influx hotma people, they're an interior Salish people, and they live sort of in this area, sort of bounded on the north by Lillo, it's on the south by spasm in the east by Ashcroft and on the west by this area here. So this series of this the area of the influx of speaking people and who produced some of the work we're going to be looking at today. So yeah. This is many you may be familiar with this place that is lit in British Columbia. No, Lytton is a very important place in the info Kotla to the Atacama people, they believe it's the center of the world. This is like Jerusalem to the cottonwood people. And it's because Mythological Beings were believed to send it to the sky from this point to retrieve all sorts of information and knowledge from Sky beings and brought it back to the earth and landed at this particular place here. That's much revered by the people today. So this is the center of the Pentecostal world, politically, socially, for over 5000 6000 years. And so the area where I'm going I've been working in is up here, there's the Stein River Valley, which flows into the this is the Fraser course, over here we've got the Thompson entering the Fraser, and just up here is the Stein River Valley, one of these. It's a river that flows into the needs of Fraser just up here, and this is where I've been working for a number of years. This is an old BC air Photomath showing the Stein river going way up here. And so the Fraser is down here and the river goes all the way up through this mountain valley in a spectacular valleys never been logged or there's been a little bit of mining here and there but there are no roads through this valley. There is an ancient Aboriginal trail that follows the River all the way up through the Mid Valley up into the Alpine and actually connects with a series of Aboriginal trails that actually lead to the coast so people from Linton here would use this route to access places like little bit Lake mount curry the whistler area, Duffey Lake, and then they would you know, from from those points they would connect with other trails would go down through Harrison to the Fraser River or down through the check in this river to Squamish. Here's just a map showing a Fraser River here, there's Litton. And there's the Stein River Valley. And of course, you can see here, if you just follow that up here, you know, just over the past, you can access a little bit late mount curry and so part of a network of Aboriginal trails that covered the whole province. I mean, basically, when you look at most of the highways in BC, they follow ancient Aboriginal routes. And in my study of rock, I found that most of most, if not all of the rock paintings in southern Washington, in Washington State, British Columbia, are found and located along these routes. And there's a very, there's a connection between the placement of these paintings along these roads. And here's the reason you know they're connected. So Stein, that's sort of the current intricate misspelling, sign means hidden place or hide it means it refers to something hiding. So what's hiding in the sign these peaks, these are two very important mountains of housing and keep now these and they see behind him because here we are in the flats on the west bank of the Fraser River, very dry kind of country and this is actually the site of the old villages I still a populous reserve here. But it's sort of off the picture with modern homes. But the original village site has probably been occupied for up to 7000 years continuously. So there's a lot of remains of pit houses and a lot of archaeological material here. And but the important part about this area, these mountains now, elders that I was working with in the 1980s refer to these mountains as the Indian colleges, because this is where people went to train, especially individuals who are known as Satnaam. And these are like shamans, Indian doctors, medicine, man, whatever you want to call them, they were actually, you know, the surgeons, they were the physicians of the day. And as part of their training, they would spend long time long periods in the in the alpine areas, particularly on these two mountains. And in their belief system, they would spend, you know, days out there months, sometimes years, and in that process would acquire a lot of knowledge of being in the wilderness, and they would acquire visions that gave them their expertise in healing, or whatever aspect of the profession they're kind of interested in. And so the reason they're hiding is if you're walking along the bench here, you can just sort of get glimpses of the top. So you rarely see these peaks except at certain points. So this is how that this place got its name Stein assign is very important place for other reasons. They believe that ancient supernatural beings visited this place in, you know, way back in ancient times, and left their left traces of their passing and various spots. So here's this big, open flat, and there's this tiny rock here, I mean, this rocks only about this big, and you can't really see it, but there's a tiny footprints on here. And this was believed to be one of the footprints of one of these transformers left here as evidence of their travels. And the supernatural beings traveled everywhere and gave the land its current shape, they transformed you know, diabolical beings into rock, and they, they taught people the various techniques of survival and basically establish the cultural pattern for the for the contemporary people. And there's lots of stories and legends about these people. And of course, the physical trace of their presence is found in little rocks like this and, and in mountains and things that they transformed. So in my art, and so I did my archaeological research.

Speaker 2 12:23
You know, I'm interested in material culture, the paintings that which we're going to be seeing in a bit, but the most of my information comes from people like this, this is a photo, these are some elders from Stein, this picture was taken in the 1960s, in front of the old Mission Church at Sky St. Davids of Stein, and I have the privilege of working with some of these people like Andrew Gianni, and the Justice family, back in the 80s, when they were a lot older, and they are here, and these people, you know, have a lot of traditional knowledge that has been transmitted down through family lines. So this is very exciting for me to work in this area, because we have direct historical and cultural continuity spanning 1000s of years, you know, these people, their ancestors have lived here for a long period of time. And so even though there's been a lot of disruption in their culture, from disease, and warfare, and you know, the impact of railways and you know, logging and stuff, this is one of this is a place where the, the cultural teachings are really quite well preserved, and, and the language as well. So, it's really fortunate for us as archaeologists, you know, we can, we can compare the findings, our findings with, you know, their traditional teachings, and then come up with some sort of what I call mutually constructed histories of federated knowledge where we, you know, we don't, you know, privilege, our knowledge over there as we work together to, you know, come up with what the past was like, here's my fellow interviewed neotys Andrew Johnny with a mountain goat that he shot up here. And this is the lower Stein you can see it's a BEAUTIFUL PRISTINE River and this is the lower reaches of the Stein goes through about 13 Different bio geo climatic zones. So it's a really marvelous place. And there was a long wilderness campaign in the 1980s. To preserve it, I was I was involved in it. And it was really a really close call. This place could have been easily eroded and logged and destroyed within like 10 or 20 years. But fortunately, a lot of people came together to prevent this happening now it's a giant Class A provincial park that's co managed by the by BC parks and the info COPPA tribal council. I was also privileged to work in the early or late 80s and early 90s was this woman and he's that CO York an elder of citizen who was a an outstanding indigenous scholar, she, as she was born 1902 And because she had some white ancestry as she was growing up she was she wasn't forced into the residential schools which was fine by her because she remained home and worked with the extended family and our great aunts and grandparents, and received all the traditional teachings were As most people who are age were stuck in these residential schools, and you know, not allowed to speak the language, but the most important thing was that they were dis are the most significant thing was that they were disconnected from the traditional teaching. So a lot of people lost it. Unfortunately, people like any York, were able to, you know, just continue on within the culture and, and pass on their teachings to people like me and many, many other scholars, she's worked with a whole bunch of people. And in the 1993, we produced this book, an anthropologist named Richard Daley got a hold of drawings, I did the scale drawings of all the rockhard in the Sinai River Valley, which he showed to her and she basically interpreted them because she was taught the significance, a lot of the symbolism, and iconography, so it's real. And we're so lucky. I mean, she, within about a year of, of working with her, she died. And so it was really, it's so critical to work with elders, you know, because they're not around forever, you got to really make an effort if you want to retain this knowledge, because personally, it just dies. It's like, it's like a library's gone, poof, like that. Anyway, so working with these people, like any orc and the others at Stein, we began to get ideas of who made these paintings, as, you know, these, this is the paintings we're gonna be looking at this is just one example. And it beginning and even in 1890s, early scholars, you know, people have been working in the site for about 150 years, you know, non natives, you know, just curious about different things there. And they were all told that the paintings are done by individuals like this club, shoe, and canoe, these are sweating on shut Nam is a name for the means, possessor of a sacred song, because these these men would go out into the wilderness, they were trained, and they would receive a song and this song gave them the power to, to heal people into you know, diagnose and treat various illnesses, psychological and physical. And, and these men were always said to be responsible for these paintings. You know, there's been a lot of speculation about paintings, and I'll get into some of the some of the speculation some of the nonsense about it. But you know, you go to the people, they'll tell you who made these paintings, individuals like this. And this man is very interesting canoe. He trained in the Sinai in 1900. And his training, what do you did, he went up there, and he laid on a frozen lake for 10 days, and then received his power. And he's a very famous doctor, in the Listen area. And okay, and this is what we're gonna be looking at. People call these kinds of names, you know, pictographs hieroglyphs. I mean, there's all kinds of names in our in English. But in the indigenous language, they're called suck. And suck is a word that combines a lot of things like combines the word painting, picture and writing. So it's very interesting. This is a writing. So all this stuff here, so that suck, that suck, either suck that suck. And so writing is something that communicates some sort of information. So what is this paint made of this is a rock, an Aboriginal Student in Kamloops did this as an experiment for her class, she got a hold of some traditional red ochre, which is iron oxide. And she tried different recipes, and put them painted them on this boulder and just left them out in the rain left this out in the rain for about a couple of months to see what would happen. And you can see some very faded designs here, these were this, this was paint made just from water and straight iron oxide from a quarry. And you can see it's all you know, it's pretty well deteriorated. Whereas these ones were, she made a mixture of these salmon, egg paste or something grounded salmon eggs with the ochre and you can see it's withstood the elements, and we'll see some of these paintings. You know, we're still sort of dealing with the ages. Now, this paint doesn't last forever, definitely. But the ingredients of the paint, allow it to last longer than than it would if it was just natural iron oxide. And this is something I'm looking at, in my studies that UVC was scanning electron microscopes or trying to look at the components of this paint, see what kind of recipes these people were using, what kind of materials they were adding to the paint. And so, you know, we talked about rock paintings, we tend to, you know, in the West separate them from everything else. But in the indigenous culture. These paintings that appear on rocks are the same as the paintings that appear on faces. And these are just two examples of two women with face painting with the painted on their faces. And they also use this pay to decorate garments. This is a rawhide dress, from the 1880s with a whole bunch of red ochre designs on it. This one's kind of interesting to me because it shows sort of a transition from the earlier style which was kind of more linear, and like this with a more here with this later style where they're introducing Western conventions of representation, showing people in profile with more details of dress now that's all sort of European uninfluenced, but it's the same stuff, they're showing that just stylistically, it's changing, but it's the same has the same meaning. Here, this is not a painting per se, this is a bone to from Lilu, it dates from 1840. This was found in a grave up in your little bit. And it's this is an unrolled portion of this card bone to showing these designs, the suc, these are very similar to the iconography we're going to be looking at, in a bit. Here's another example of a, this is a detail of an individual dressed up in traditional clothing with his shield. And here's kind of a poor drawing that I did just to give an idea of, of the paintings, but here you have that similar style of imagery in Red Ochre Paint on a shield. And so So what what are they doing what's going on here, mostly, this paint. When you when you research and ask native people about the role of paint in the culture, the most important thing about the Red Ochre Paint is it provides protection is protective qualities to it. And that has to do with a lot of this. The reason for it being on shields on clothing on faces on rocks, people are putting these paintings on to protect these places. And usually the iconography, the figures in this are derived from dreams. And I talked about people going off into the, the wilderness and getting visionary experiences and they would receive this song, but along with the song came a visual component with that they would use in, in the in their religious and spiritual practice.

Speaker 2 21:34
So so we these paintings, of course don't occur everywhere, they only occur in specific places. And these places are known in Indian language as shame. And shame means a transformed Mythological Beings a lot of these places. And you can just sort of see this one here. This is this cliff where I've been working here for about 25 years. It's one of the largest rock art sites in Canada. And and this is just the top part of the cliff and the site extends about 100 meters on base. But if you look up at the top of the clip, you can see all these faces in the clip. And, you know, it's a bit like looking at the clouds, you know, what do you see in the cloud net, but they're unmistakable anthropomorphic features in most of these landscapes, which lends support to the idea that these are transformed mythical beings. And they were painted by these short and on these shamans, for some reason, within the last 500 years, and this is sort of what I'm dealing with my PhD I'm looking at why were they painting these places within the last five centuries? Oh, this, I'll just show this one's kind of interesting too, because there's natural iron oxide here, like if this is the eye, the nose in the mouth, here's some natural iron oxide, sort of coming from the mouth. So another kind of feature that would have made this place kind of stand out and be significant. And this site is also along the trail. So I'm just going to go quickly through some of the early research on the Stein River Valley. Europeans have been interested in this valley since well, 1860, Governor Douglas actually higher, asked a survey to go in and see if it could provide a route from Litton, to the coast. So it was well known that this Stein River was a trail. But this guy went up there. And you know, he didn't think it would be very suitable for mule trains and that so it was abandoned. But a few years later, this gentleman came in now this is a really interesting guy just put them up because it's such a cool story. His name is Karl purpose. If you're biologists a plant biologist, and you start researching this guy, he was he was the preeminent German plant botanist of the 19th century, and he worked most of his career in North America, you know, identified, you know, 1000s of plants from BC down to Mexico and an incredible man. And he went into the sky in 1887. He was up in the Spencer's bridge area, he's collecting plants for some reason. He decided to have an undertaking expedition up the Stein hired a First Nations guide at Linton and went up there. And then when he came back to Germany, he published in a magazine called Auslan. And Auslan. Is, was like the, the most popular travel magazine in Germany. And he included some drawings of a rock painting site that he encountered up here. This is called EBR K eight. That's where the archaeologists we get. This is based on a system an art of identifying archaeological sites throughout Canada. And it's based on quadrants, this just happens to be the EDR K quadrant, with the ACE archaeological site identified there. And it's right up here and this is the one purpose visited in 1887. And it's interesting, this one's eight miles up the Stein and there's much larger sites further down and but he wasn't shown any of these places, which kind of shook indicates to me that the indigenous people were were kind of keeping some of these places secrets. They didn't really want non natives to know about them, but This particular site, there's no way you can go up here without seeing it, because it's just the nature of the train. The trail goes right below this, what's the only way to get up the valley. And so anybody going up there would see these paintings as he did, and he drew them. And we know from his drawings, they're not that accurate. But I can tell from the iconography that is referring to that site. But anyway, but it was interesting, because I believe this man, Franz Boas, who's one of the leading fathers of modern day anthropology, he's from Germany, and I believe that he's he got he saw, purposes article, and, and figured this would be a good place to include in this expedition he was forming at the time, and it was the Jessup North Pacific expedition that at 97 This is the first integrated sort of anthropological archaeological study, modern sort of scientific study in the world, basically, at 97. Right in the interior of British Columbia. And the and the actually the object of the expedition, it was based out of the Museum of Natural History in New York, the object was to try and collect data that would show connections between Asia and the Pacific Northwest. And so Boaz gathered together a team of an international team of scholars like Heartland Smith and American from New York, he's an archaeologist, and this gentleman who's a Scottish immigrant who had had relocated to Spences bridge Alec there, James Alexander Tate, and this guy, he's like the preeminent early anthropologists of British Columbia. He was not trained, you know, it was a, he was a he was a natural born scholar who, who Bo has just ran into by accident expenses bridge, he had come over, this guy come over from the Orkneys in 1880s, married a native woman became proficient in all the languages with BC interior. And so Bo, as you know, immediately recognize this guy's as just you know, a diamond in the rough, and over the the collaborate together for about 20 years, and this guy produce volumes of material, like I use this guy's stuff all the time. He's just an amazing man, and did a lot of work with First Nations who are advocating their rights and, you know, act as as a translator and, and a petition writer. So go as arranged a really fantastic team. And of course, one of the areas of study was the Stein River Valley. Here's another gentleman, Charles Hill, two of Abbotsford and Vancouver. Now he was, he was a little more lightweight intellectually, and bow as an MO as mme. And you know, fighty is kind of interesting, but didn't want him in the team. But but he came up there anyway, and hung out and did his own kind of writing. And I think a lot of it's very valuable. And so he'll too, and these other gentlemen, all of them worked in the Stein in the late 1890s. And so I'm just going to look at some of the places they worked, and kind of work our way up the valley a bit. I can't show everything, but I'll show you some of the major sites. And this is one of the most important ones, this is near the, it's just about five miles from the confluence of the Fraser and Stein River, and it's called Well, there's it's a board designation, but the local people refer to it as the asking rock. And the reason is here you can see the trail, this is the trail, you know that this ancient Aboriginal trail, people pass by it and the paintings that are located up here. And this is traditionally where people ask permission to to enter the valley. And you can just see kind of the weird shapes in the rock here that give this place it's kind of unique quality, this is another transformed supernatural being. If you go there kind of looks like a huge head with all these skulls. And so I mean, you can let your imagination run if you when you go to these places. And there's also a lot of strange acoustic oops, a strange acoustic call qualities. Here's a gentleman praying below the rock panel, there's a rock panel up here with paintings. And if you're standing down here at a certain location, you can hear the the river echoing back from this one spot. It's only if you stand in a certain spot. And then you hear this. There's a lot of strange acoustic effects. And here, am I taking a break from my work lying in a natural hollow beneath the paintings and just see some of the paintings up here that were done in, in the past. And so he'll to and these early scholars, you know, they asked, you know, who made the paintings, you know, how do people use these places, and they were told that the paintings were made in the past by noted shamans. But they also noted that people went here, and young people went and trained in these places. And there's all these natural sort of stone beds in here. And I interviewed elders in the 80s, who, when they were children, they remember seeing these beds, you know, they were proper for bow beds, you know, they were, you know, laid out there and people would come here and just young people would come and just sort of lie there and contemplate the paintings and you know, try to absorb some of the teachings you know, they weren't just going in here cold Of course, they had a lot of traditional teachings but they would be at a certain age. You know, when you turn reached puberty you were instructed to go out to certain places like this, and you know, just not eat, you know, do a lot of praying and then contemplation, and then eventually you have all kinds of visions and, and ideas about your role in life. So it's Chuck Smith went here in 1897, and took photographs. These are the earliest known photographs of rock art in British Columbia. You know, he wasn't too pleased, because I mean, you're trying to photograph these panels, like, here's a panel today. And here's his photograph, you can sort of see the calcium carbonate here, it's the same stuff. And you can see vestiges of the paintings, they don't come out too well, and black and white, of course, and this is my photo taken in 2010. But we can find a lot of information by comparing these early photographs with the paintings here. For example, there's paintings here that appeared later, they don't appear on Smith's drawing at night or photo at 97. So we can assume that these are later added later, which shows that this practice continued into the 20s 20th century. Here's another painting, or drawing Smith did a lot of drawings of these paintings. And here's just a comparison of a drawing he did at 97 with one here, the actual painting. And there's one of these more recent paintings, the sun burst. And it's not shown in Smith's drawing, which indicates was done post at 97.

Speaker 2 31:29
And this just gives you an idea of the paintings how they look today. And it really depends on the time of year if you went this was this photo was taken in the summer. And of course, this is the interior, it's very dry litens, one of the hottest places on in Canada at that time of year. And but if you go here in March, this rock surface is covered with water. And these paintings just leap out at you actually, I'm going up there in March this year. And I'm going to do a whole bunch of a high resolution photography of the paintings with the the immersed in the in the water runoff to get a better idea of of their visibility, but I'm going to show you other techniques we have for enhancing this in a bit. Okay, who was not funny? Anyway, here's another shoe. What was that? Oh, did I just okay, sorry. I just show this one because show you the size of some of the paintings like in my studies, I'm interested in the stratigraphy of paintings because these sites are basically what we call Pylab sets, which are overlaid images. And so there's different time periods represented here, people, these paintings don't represent one single episode, they represent several episodes of painting. So I'm interested in that progression. This just shows you some the size of some of these paintings, I mean, these are tiny, you can see here three inches and these tiny little paintings of fish. So they range in size from a meter in size to, you know, diminutive little markings. This is just a base on a drawing that I This is a drawing I did in the 1980s when I was working for the Litton Indian Band. And I was involved last year with a ecotourism project where the band's trying to build up an infrastructure for ecotourism in the valley. So they're producing things like this withdrawing to the infinite, my guides can use this as a basis of, you know, giving people instruction about the site. And what we've done here is incorporated drawings that I did back in the 80s, with commentary by Annie York, because she looked at these detailed drawings, and offered her interpretations of what the imagery meant, for example, um, she's talking here about this little scene here. You know, if we didn't have this knowledge, you wouldn't have a clue about this, what represented this little drawing, she says, on the left is the man who dreams dreams, the creation of animals being brought in the service. And this is all, you know, she was taught the the symmetry. And this is kind of, we still can't accept this though, as the absolute fact. Because what this is, is the educated guess of an elder because Annie York was grew up in spas in which is, you know, about 100 miles south of here, but she was taught about the sign paintings by elders when she was a young person. So she's really drawing on her memory, and other sorts of sources of information to interpret this. So but you know, it's great stuff, because it's, and the book that we produce, it's the only book ever co authored by a senior American Indian elder. So it's kind of in its notorious book, because, you know, it kind of challenged a lot of assumptions that Western scientists had about this art and what it meant. Okay, so anyway, we're moving up the Stein here. The phrase is just down here, and this is the lower Canyon you see very steep this is where you know, BC forest products had an idea of building a road up here would have destroyed lots of sites. I was kind of my role in the whole site say the Stein thing was just pointing out the no brainer that you can't build the road here without destroying all the sites below. It was really funny to see how BC for its products to try and rationalize this, this construction. But anyway, so these early researchers though never made it past this site. And there this is a large a cliff here with paintings along it. And this is basically where they stopped, they didn't go any further. And I believe that the they didn't go further because the info Kotla were stripping access to the larger sites for the valley. But they did do a good record of this. Here's a photograph taken in 1897. Harland Smith's brother in law is shown here making a sketch of a painting, and there's a sketch he made. And this painting is still very visible. And so they did a bunch of work there. And eventually it was published in 1900. And this, the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, this has recently been republished or republished by the Nicola Valley Museum, highly recommended as an introduction into James Tate's work, it's just a, it's just a beautiful ethnography. And so this is a plate that was included in the book showing some of the Stein paintings along with other ones from different areas. And this is sort of a whole range of ventral Kotla rock painting from Spences. Bridge, Ashcroft and Stein River, and the Nicola Valley, you can see that all the similarities and style are pretty obvious. Okay, so this early research was completed around 1900. And nobody really sort of went up to the valley except for indigenous people, trappers and, and doing the traditional harvesting. Elders have always described the Stein as our church, our our soup, our store, and our medicine cabinet, those three things are represented by the signers Valley. Now, this is interesting, because this there was an interesting manuscript that was the came to light in the 80s, when we were doing our research on the Stein, it was much a UBC students who went up there from the from the Department of Geography in 1919, because they were young man from Latin, but they were going to UBC, and they one of them had this idea that he was gonna go up and, you know, do drawings of all the pictographs. And so these are the first records we have of some of the major sites of the valley. Of course, he produced this manuscript, and it's just totally off the wall. Because in those days, 9090 9020, Europe was obsessed with Egypt, you know, the tooten, common tombs are coming up. And it was this whole sort of AI idea of heliocentrism, that, you know, all religions in the world, all cultures emerged out of Egypt, and they all worship the sun. And so he went up there, and he had this theory that all the paintings and the Stein were the product of these painters who traveled all over the world 1000s years ago, is all crazy stuff. But just kind of interesting, you know, kind of reflection of, of, you know, imposing these sort of current European ideas on this art. But fortunately, when he when he produced this little manuscript, he did go into Latin and ask some elders about the paintings. And they provided some really key information that fortunately, he included in his manuscript, and very key little details about the significance in of the painting and cultural practice. So now we're going to look at the the big site that I've been working on, which was sort of a, a big chunk of my PhD, and it's called, it's located right up here. This past this sort of right up there, and Stein River Valley at the base of a cliff and suck, you may remember, suck early means paintings suck, it's just a plural of paintings, that means lots of paintings. And that's what we're going to find up here. It's one of the largest rock painting sites in Canada. And this is me on the upper trail, looking up the valley, and the the site is located down here at the base of a cliff. And the river flows down along here and up here. So the cliff is down there. And right directly across from the cliff is this very unusual rock formation that looks like a face in the side of the mountain, this thing's huge and dominates the landscape. And it's directly across from the site. And years ago, when I was working at smoky Valley, you know, I was talking to an elder and he said, you know, we're just talking about the imagery, you know, and he said, it's not what you're looking at, turn around and look at what the paintings are facing. So it just shows, you know, in the western, you know, sort of culture, we tend to focus too much on the material culture, like the paintings per se, and I used to do that to the paintings are the most significant thing. But now I'm finding out that they're not they're very, they're very historic. They're what we call historically contingent, they were only done at one certain period in history. But the place is prior to the paintings and places the important thing so you're at this site, you turn around, you look up the mountain, there's this enormous, huge head right across from it. So there's a connection between this place and this other feature. Here is just the cliff and here you can see more kind of giant faces and you really get the feel think that you're at the base of a bunch of philosophy at this site. And it's a large, you know, granite cliff. And it's only about 2030 meters from the river. And the paintings are found all along the base of this cliff. Long here, like this gives you an idea of the train here, it's very, you know, so overgrown grove of cedar trees and fruit trees on the, the eluvial bench between the cliff and we can see the clip here is kind of obscured by these trees, but really quite a remarkable place. And it also has a lot of unusual acoustic features. You know, I've been here working on occasions, and you can swear you hearing music or something. And I, you know, I remember spending days here doing work, and hearing this sort of like music and I figured out some hiker coming up the trail with a ghetto blaster or something, and then just forgot about it. No hikers showed up. And then after a while, I figured it was the the acoustics because the rivers flowing. You know, like I said, 30 meters from the big clip face. And so you're getting these echoes and weird sort of sound patterns. And it just adds to the kind of the, the mystery in the aura of the place. So 2009, I got permission to do some archaeological work here.

Speaker 2 41:17
And we didn't do a lot of digging, because I kind of believe that we have to, you know, archaeology is a destructive kind of methodology. You know, when you when you're digging in the ground, you're destroying a lot of the evidence as you're recovering it. And so it's really important, I think, to go in increments. So we just excavated a small one by one unit air here, actually, we started by 20 centimeter by 50 centimeter units beneath the paintings. And the original idea was that we're going to try and locate some bits of paint or droplets from the paintings in the ground in association with, with organic materials so that we could perhaps date the episode when these paintings were done. And I'm still working on this stuff, sorting through the, the material that we uncovered and correlating it with the Yoker fragments that we fall in. And you can see all the paintings here that we did this excavation here under an overhang that was covered with paintings. So we were hoping, and we did recover a lot of pigment that had fallen from these paintings, because this is a granite cliff, granite exfoliates, you know, with with with freezing and thawing cycles, you know, it's obtained and material are always continually falling. And not just little bits, but big bits, big huge. You can see a slab like this is there used to be a big rock shelter here. This is it actually, years ago, this, these slabs would have been in place up here. And there was a nice sort of cave in here. And there's a lot of thick cultural deposits in here. But we decided not to do any work here, although I will do the doing work here eventually. But we did a small little excavation just at the front there. My buddy climbed in here crawled in under the the overhang this fall in shelter. And you can see there's there's paintings that were originally on the inside of this overhang on the ceiling of it, here and there. So we're going to be doing more work on restoring those. So this is just sort of a summary of into coma rock shelters. There hasn't been a lot of work done on this is the excavation we did in three sort of components, we uncovered a hearth here, and these are just all our little exploratory deposits, you can see the deposits very shallow, like this is only 13 centimeters deep of cultural deposits. And when you think of our coastal mittens here that are, you know, meters meters thick, you know, these are very restricted, you know, specialized activities. This is another rocks painting site, this near Ashcroft were in the 1980s or so or 1990s or so who's a well known archaeologist did some work at the base of these paintings here, but they did these giant units here. But we came up with very similar findings, which is low to moderate sediment accumulation, small quantities of fire, altered rock, minimal flora and fauna remains minimal tool production and our maintenance. So we're not finding a lot of stuff here. So what this tells us is is very restricted, specialized activities going on at these locations, which isn't surprising once you ask people about the significance of these places. And this is just another detail of the stratigraphy which is, you know, the subsurface deposits, again, very shallow, that's the sterile, sort of Sandy, alluvial deposit. And here's the cultural deposits not very deep, you know, 13 centimeters, you see a bit of ash here from a fire and but not very deep deposits, so very restricted short term activities. This is a very interesting thing. This was debit Taj, and this is the leftover remnants from toolmaking. And people have done a lot of study on this stuff because, you know, a lot of people think of archaeology, we're interested in the finally finished arrowheads and all that stuff. And they're all really cool and interesting. But a lot of people in last 20 years have been interested in, in in the reduction process, like how these tools are made. And, and so deputized is very important. And we didn't find any large artifacts at this place. This is all we found, you can see this stuff tiny, like, these are just, you know, literally millimeters in size. And these, by studying all this stuff, I determined that this was the remnants of late stage reduction activities. So what that means is, people are here and they're either just honing tools that are already made, you know, putting a little edge on them, you know, just touching them up, or they're producing very tiny, little sharp implements. And what was interesting to me is that we had continuity here in, in manufacture, but a, a change in the material, the raw material, and as you can see up here, we found glass in the upper levels. And in this glass isn't just you know, the remains of a little bottles of people through there, people were utilizing glass because when glass was introduced into the indigenous culture throughout British Columbia, people quickly recognized its cutting abilities, you know, and used it in in toolmaking. So, it was interesting in the later sort of period here, they post 1850 posts, we find traditional toolmaking, as represented by you know, basalt, quartzite deputise, mixed in with similar sized glass cabotage. So they're making glass implements, as well as stone ones. And of course, further down here, it's all the salt mostly Basalt is sort of the material from toolmaking in the PC interior, and usually makes up like 9080 to 90% of the tools found in any site. This just shows some of the debit ties from the little units, this is from unit one, eight. So this are unit one, B, this is just one little unit we dug here, that's the debit charge, we found, you know, the different centimeter levels, 10 to 12, quite a bit of the bottom seven, eight centimeters, and then the glass extend with the indigenous material at the top. And here's a photograph of a quartzite piece and again, a very small piece, and quartzite rare material in the record. And there's only one little piece here. So people here are not into full scale tool production, very tiny. They're making tiny tools and and, you know, not a lot of them. You know, if you go down to the mouth of the river here, and you dug a one by one meter site, you would find maybe, you know, 1000s of bits of deputise, as opposed to 36 that I found here, just right away a straight indication that something else is going on here that's different. This is a very interesting thing, we found this tiny little piece of pitch, this is a, I believe it's from the Western larch, and this was an ingredient used in paint making. So it's a leftover piece of, you know, an ingredient in the production of paint, which is you know, what we're going to be examining in the, with the, the electron microscope at UBC. Other things we found there, ochre, acorus, lots of ochre chunks, and seeds choke cherry or such oak Terry actually, it's the smaller one pin cherry, which also is traditionally used as a paint material. And this is about the other only other artifact we found. This is a segment of a den Talian bead, very small, like 12344 and a half millimeters tiny. We and I should also add, we were using a very tiny mesh, a lot of archaeologists will they don't do it so much anymore. But traditionally, people use like a quarter 1/8 mesh, in their screening when you're screening the you know, as you're taking off layers of sediment, here, we use a one and a half millimeter mesh, so we, you know, recovered a lot of material that would otherwise be lost. And in the actually, prior to that 1020 years ago, so much material was lost in archaeological excavations, because people weren't paying attention to it. And so it's really important to, you know, have a small mesh. And also we did bulk soil samples, which I'm going through at UBC actually looking at bulk soil samples with a microscope and you finding stuff that's even smaller than one and a half mil. But this is all you know, important stuff to aid in the reconstruction site. So I'm interested in the cultural deposits of the site but really the main the main focus of my study is on the rock painting and here just shows and yeah, it's it's super imposition history. And so here is the rock face. This is just the top of that rock shelter that I was showing earlier one of the slabs and this shows you the the incredible beautiful Little geology of this site. This is granite. And there's different types of granite here, there's an earlier granite, with later quartzite intrusions that have kind of displaced the original sort of slabs. And so it's really interesting geological history going on here that I'm going to get into more in my studies, but you can see all these thin veins of quartz. But it's this sort of thing that made this place sort of special and significant to indigenous people in the past and sort of marked it as a sacred important place a shame. And you can just see, I mean, maybe you can't see, you can see vestiges of paintings here. Now, one of the trouble problems with rock painting, you know, is that it deteriorates over time, you know, this is on a north facing slope, which is very unusual. In BC, most rock painting sites, I'd say 80 90%, or south facing, this is north facing. And so it's inundated every year with water, which further erodes the painting, so you can hardly see them. But with this, we have a new technology, though developed by image sensor, image sensing and Nassau, actually, and this fella had had a call a friend who is working for NASA. And he was interested in this image enhancement in developing an image enhancement software to enhance an algorithm to enhance

Speaker 2 51:17
the values the color, red ochre color values. And so what we're getting is, it's called D Stretch D correlation stretch. So you can see here, you know, these pains, I'll get better ones, but there's the cliff face. And then with the D correlation stretch, you can start to see where there's paintings all over the place up to, you know, more than 50 meters up the cliff face. And that's not a very good resolution picture, but I'll get some details here. For example, this one, this one's about fifth to five meters up. Oh, is it five, five meters up? Yeah. I clicked it. Yeah, five meters up. And this is one of the largest paintings in the DC interior. It's a remarkable painting, it's about a meter high, and weigh up on the side of the cliff. So they're either building scaffolding, or they're falling trees, or they were levitating up, or rappelling down. I mean, this add adds to the mystery and significance of this place. But this is interesting to me with this the correlation stretch, you can start to see painting history here, like this image overlaps this earlier one, you see these series of linear images. And it's clear that this one overlaps this. So this image is later than this one. And so I'm compiling sort of the history of the site based on this enumerating all these separate positions, what I'm eventually going to do with this site is read, reconstruct it usually digitally using a big digital reconstruction of the site. In correlation with the archaeology, that's just a fancy low resolution picture of it. So here's another, this is just moving further along the cliff, again, we're up around three, five meters up. And you can just see sort of traces with this and, and then when you put on the D correlation, added into the software, you can start to see images appearing. And with further fine tuning, we can get better resolution. So we'll be ultimately we'll be able to see exactly what was painted here, by basically kind of connecting the dots. And this is a really interesting one, another area of the cliff. And you know, if you look at the naked eye, when I worked here in the 80s, of course, this technology wasn't available. So I would spend days they would like a magnifying glass. And just trying sometimes it literally almost had to guess what was there, although I'd never put down a gift and you know, just kind of had to trace what was there and kind of just leave it at that. But this image, you do the de correlation stretch, and you start to see the paintings emerge out of it. A very interesting painting. And this one, you know, it's a bit messy. This one, there might even be a couple of episodes of painting here. But you know, the idea wasn't to make a pretty picture. The idea was to just make a painting. So the painting the the iconography of the finished product wasn't as important as the actual practice of doing it. You know, they weren't creating art they're creating, it was a ritualistic practice. Now here is a huge panel. Very intriguing. You can tell there's a lot of stuff going on here to the naked eye. This is about what it would look like today. If any of you went up there. You can just see things here. I tried my darndest to replicate this with a drawing years ago, but nothing beats the D correlation stretch. And this is a very exciting painting because there's multiple episodes here painting. You can see sort of earlier paintings in here, the sort of skeletal figure you can see a head here and a torso with a ribcage and legs and then these later darker paintings that are painted down over top of the earlier work. But even here, you know you're not you're not getting a sense of a long time periods is a very kind of narrow time range we're looking at. And here's a very interesting one. I don't know if you can make it out, but very exciting image. It's a double headed serpent. And this site is unique in British Columbia, the double headed serpent is very common on the, in the coast, you know, sis util. And I think all of you have sort of seen those images. The BC interior very, very rare, except for this one site, which has all these sort of travel corridor connections to the coast. And one of them shown here you can see his friend head, there's his eye, and his open mouth and a tongue and a leg because they have legs. And there's, here's the, the other head, the other head here, tongue, and the front leg. Very cool. And this is a very powerful guardian spirit of the sweat. Nah, nobody, you know, if you came across these in in your vision quest or something, and didn't have the requisite power, he would kill you. You bleed from every orifice, you'd be twisted into shade, you die. But if you had if you're a man of power, you would acquire this as as a powerful healing spirit. And then, of course, just going back to what the image looks like today, so this D correlation stretches has revolutionized rock art, in the in the in the PC, interior and everywhere, across all throughout the world. And if any are interested, you know, I would Google just Google D stretch capital D stretch, and you can go to the site with it and see the work that this gentleman John Harman has done. Here's another image way up on the side of the cliff, you can see I mean, I recognize this back in the day is another one of these two headed snakes painted along a quartz vein because quartz is very significant material to the indigenous people. And the D correlation, stretch brings them right out. It was really exciting to me to to see this, even though I kind of knew what the image was. But see that one of the heads has this wonderful mouthful of teeth. And as I was up there this summer with it with a native goth kid, and he was he pointed out, you know, we were looking at these snakes, and he noticed that every one of them had a different head, you know, they weren't sort of exactly the same on each side. So it was kind of neat observation. Here again, you know, a very, you know, difficult an image, it's difficult to see, the D correlation stretch brings a right out very interesting image here, of sort of a body here and a head and lines with various game animals surrounded by circles, all kinds of interesting stuff going on here. Again, this is kind of a low resolution first attempt, I'm going to be making more high resolution photographs of this and then like I said, reconstructing basically the whole cliff face. Another shot this is just above the rock shelter where you're working. You can see a lot of this a lot of these paintings too are covered with this calcium carbonate. You know, I mentioned the the water that is every year leeches out this water carries with it calcium carbonate and other minerals that are dissolved in groundwater. And as the water evaporates, it leaves this widest residue. And in the summer, it's like almost opaque, and covers a lot of the pains. But what it does actually is protects the actual pigment because as it goes down over the pigment, pigment no longer is falling off. It's preserved and actually encased in this calcium carbonate. And the D stretch again, brings it out is various game animals here and other interesting iconography. Again, another just a vestige of an image here, D correlation stretch. Search the round circle here with smaller circles attached to it. And I love the false color. Note Taking this up giving presentations to the native school up and letting in and everybody loves to false colors kind of psychedelic and crazy. But kind of fun to this is one of the most exciting things for me was this panel, which is one of the best preserved there for the naked eye. Like a lot of people go to the site, you kind of disappointed they heard about the stains and the Stein they go up they go like paintings inherently see. But this one's pretty visible of the D stretch. It's really quite remarkable. What comes out. And here we have a lovely example of superimposed paintings again, you can see back here, one of these two headed snakes again, there's one hand on one side, one hand, the other side, this one's got a big fat body and see his little legs here. And then attached to grizzly book pair prints. These are grizzly paw prints by the way. It's very standard kind of iconography. It's one that it's one of the few the images that we can interpret because we you know, people recognize it. And it's you know, later painting superimposed over earlier ones. So that's really interesting to me. Here's Another painting up there that's so well preserved to the naked eye. And then you do the D stretch. And you can really see what's going on. And what's interesting about this, you can see there's two pairs here. Now this is, I found this pattern throughout the BC interior, where you will find one painting done by somebody, and then someone will come along later and copy it. And that's what this is, if you look carefully here, these are not done by the same person. And you can just by its, you know, it's pretty obvious by looking at the width of the line, and different features. But yeah, two different people. So that's very interesting to me. There's something going on here with inheritance, or some practice, but it's ubiquitous through the interior. And it's funny, in the old days before people really distinguished, they would just say, Oh, it's a repeat or copy or two images. I mean, it's two images, but done at different times.

Speaker 2 1:00:56
This is sort of a weird angle. But this is the entrance to that rock shelter, basically, the lintel to the entrance. And you can see, it's just covered with red paint a big huge blob here. And then a whole bunch of crosses. And these were done by different individuals over time, and so on. But yeah, beautiful enhancement. Here, we're inside that rock shelter, my friend, he's, he's, he's not a tall guy. So he got way in there, and got this photograph. And this is the surface of the fallen rock shelter. And with the D stretch, images leak right out at us from the past, kind of interesting stuff going on here. So here I am, we're doing our measurements. And that's our little excavation there. And just to another example of the D stretch, pointing out where the paintings are. So you can basically go to one of these sites to take this photograph, you can see where the paintings are, and then later on, hone in on the different areas, and then eventually photo stitch it all together to make the big grand, panoramic view. This is a really interesting one, you know, singing Alaska, okay, when I, when we saw this, when I first saw this figure, this is about three meters in height. And it kind of looks like a stag, showing the profile sees his rack of antlers up your head, so you can kind of imagine here's his body with his, you know, rear legs and the front legs, but you do the D stretch on it. And things aren't so simple anymore. I'm not sure that could be multiple episodes here of painting. So when it comes to rock art paintings, you know, it's people have always been influenced by what they think they see. So you can't trust the drawings at all. And I used to draw these things. And I would never do it. Now. I'd much rather rely on the digital enhancement, because you know, doesn't lie. It does. It's not subjective. So it's very useful. So this is something I'm going to have to tease out and separate with further work. Like even here, you can see this as a fancy sort of grizzly bear print that's been superimposed over the painting and a whole bunch of stuff going on here. Last few, this is just at the entrance of the site. Again, another. Here's another one of these two headed serpents up here different version, you know, they're done by different individuals, which may suggest transmission to have family lines or who knows I'm still working on it. Very interesting figure here, this winged spirit figure holding a spear, spearing a mountain sheep, shown in a very style, very characteristic of interior, Salish and people. This is another example of the sort of paired imagery, you can see an image here, you can see how the rock face is deteriorating with this calcium carbonate deposit like and growth. You know, in another century, these paintings may all be this have gone or just be traced just vestiges. But here are the D stretch, you can see this earlier painting over on the left, very interesting. So this was the earlier painting, then someone came along later and copied it. But this is all you see, you know, you only see two episodes of copying, you don't see 3456. So this again indicates to me this narrow kind of time span for the production of these images. Are you doing a time with approximately four? I would say these have been done since the beginning. rock paintings been done since the beginning. But the paintings we're looking at now date within the last few centuries, I would say. So they have something to do with what was going on in the last few centuries. And what was going on in the last few centuries. is basically the European presence in North America, which began, which, even though Europeans did not show up here on the coast, until, you know, mid 18th century, the presence of Europeans was felt some people feel as far back as 1500. And this was in the form of epidemics. And between 15 117 90 and there were subsequent epidemics, there was also a lot of disruption from, you know, trade goods, a horse guns or all kinds of things that happened. And there was a rise of profits, there were people that actually, they, they, they were kind of right in the way that the world was coming to an end. So my research and finding a lot of these paintings were done by prophets, were protecting these places, and marking them for future generations. Need image, he's got a fringe shirt, fringe hunting shirt. Anyway, this is the I mentioned later, earlier, we're doing this little excavation below a, a slab form of ceiling over this, the entrance of this shelter, and there's a painting underneath the slab, again, you can just see sort of vestiges here. But when you do the D stretch, you get some marvelous imagery. This to me is one of my favorites is what I like, I think of this as sort of a masterpiece of mental Kotla painting, I don't have the whole image here. But this was done with a brush, like a lot of these were done with fingerprint or with with fingers, because the width of the paint of the line basically corresponds to a finger tip. And this is also what we know from the ethnographies. This one, however, has very fine lines along it. And it's made with a very liquid paint. And you can see the edges of the brushes brush work on this thing. It's a really marvelous piece. And it's also a very different paint. And you can't tell from this false color. This is a very purpley paint, whereas this is more than traditional iron oxide paints. A little bit I can anyway, the this is one of these marvelous snake images, this one's nine feet long, three meters long, friend head here, then it goes all along this crack way down here, there's the other head with a bunch of other images along here. And this is something you find at these sites. When people were going here, they were looking carefully at the rock face, and using it as a guide for their painting, whatever came out of that rock and their dream or their vision or their inspiration, they would sometimes you know, follow things like rock crevices, quartzite veins, it's really important to sociate the rock face and for so long. For so many years, archaeologists were looking at these sites and just basically drawing the images that they saw and forgetting about the site. Again, this is our western kind of what we call icon of centrism. You know, he's focusing on the images as the most important thing, and they're not, they're not the most important thing, the site's the most important thing. Couple of final images is near the entrance of the site. Really interesting stuff. Andy York interpreted this as a helicopter. Now, you could say, okay, you know, but what, but what, in her discourse in interpretations of this imagery, this falls within the interpretive framework of rock painting, because it deals with prophecy. And a lot of her, I have about 16 hours of taped interview with her where she discusses these paintings. Now, she's always talking about the role of the prophets. And one of the main thing that prophets were telling people that the world is going to change, new people are going to come to this land, they're gonna bring all this stuff. And they the native people firmly believe that things like you know, pots and pans, guns, airplanes, all the accoutrements of modernity, were prophesized to the people. And so she would look at this and probably say, that kind of looks like a helicopter. Well, these were done by prophets. I believe this is an image of a helicopter. But really just indicates that change was coming. And a lot of new things are coming. And then here, we revert back to what the site looks like today. So just in conclusion, just to sort of summarize what I'm interested in, I'm interested in interdisciplinarity, which is, again, not privileging indigenous or Western points of view, but combining them in a federated knowledge. And I like this term, federated knowledge, like people have words like collaboration and all this stuff, but, you know, we're not collaborating we're we're federating our knowledge and Federation's have the connotation of political equality. So that's sort of where I'm coming from. And I like that was my, my supervisor came up with this term. Thank you, Dr. Andrew Martindale and this is my mutually constructed histories and because I, I think together or we can come up with a better idea of what happened in the past. And to me, I'm an archaeologist, but I'm not interested in the past as much as the present. And we can only understand the present by knowing how we got here. And all the indigenous languages that were, for example, the one I'm familiar with the Maori language, the past, is the word for the past is the same word as for what's in front of you. This is the big difference between the traditional Native culture and our culture. Our past is not in front of us, most people, we don't have a shared history, we're immigrants from all over the world, we barely know the place we live in here in terms of its history. And so we don't have anything to go on. Really, we can't, it's not in front of us. We're not taught we're always taught the past is behind us is done and gone. To heck with it, the future is where we're going. Indigenous cultures, the future is unknowable. We don't know the future, we know something's coming, but we cannot predict it.

Speaker 2 1:10:55
This is just a model that I use to in my work to show you some of the the principles behind this federated knowledge. Indigenous people believe that the world is composed of a physical realm and a spiritual realm. Western science, we tend to focus on the physical realm, for example, you go to rock a painting site is, uh, you know, archaeologists from 1970, you'd be focusing on the paintings, he wouldn't really pay much attention to the indigenous interpretation, you know, it's just sort of meaningless, you know, how do we know, you know, has any validity, all this sort of stuff. So for a lot, for too long, Western science has privilege, and we basically ran into a dead end, what happens is people will quantify all this material culture, but when it gets to interpretation is just way out, because they don't know what it means. But when you work with indigenous people, they bring in this whole other spiritual realm, they believe that the physical realm is just a, it's just a what is just a manifestation of the spiritual realm eight, it's basically what we can see. But there's a whole bunch of stuff behind it. So they incorporate it all into their world, and I think it's, so whatever you do in this realm is gonna have consequences. And this one, and this is sort of a nice little microcosm of the vision quest, you're in the physical realm, and you're seeking something, you go into the woods, the wilderness, and you seek the answer in the spiritual realm. And you bring that with you back to the real world, to lead a successful life. And indigenous people for over millennia, using this. This sort of methodology of life gained a lot of success, they were extremely successful at adapting to their environments, you know, they didn't go off in the woods to do flaky stuff, or you know, because they lots of time to spare. It was essential to their survival, to know what was going on in the world, learning from animals learning from nature, and using it so that people could survive. So anyway, that's the end of my talk. I hope it wasn't too rambley. And I would welcome any questions.

Speaker 3 1:13:03
Kissed y'all. Yeah. Yeah. asked that question about the dating because the technolog technology, they have developed quite sophisticated dating things because you would get, wouldn't you dating for tools? And then dating. When you use that word, which, yeah, that you said that for the

Speaker 2 1:13:38
painting? Yeah. It also means writing. And

Speaker 3 1:13:41
it also means writing. It includes the material.

Speaker 2 1:13:47
Well, yeah, it's just well, in the sense of, you know, it's made with paint. Yeah. But But yeah, it's a good question about the dating thing. And I'm actually I'm working on that. Now. The method you're referring to is carbon 14 dating. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different ones. But carbon 14 is the standard kind of archeological dating method, but to to, and it's based on the decay of radioactive carbon 14 isotopes, and it decays at a known rate. And it's present in everything and carbon, like we all have it in us, any carbon in the ground, any living thing has, when it dies, this, this, this radio cap, radioactive carbon decays at a known rate. And so there's various expensive methods of determining dates. The trouble with the paint is the paint. In order to date something in that paint, you have to find a nice chunk of carbon in it. And this has been the problem like people have taken samples of this paint, they take it back to the lab, they analyze it can't find any carbon in it. They've had success with radiocarbon dating in Australia. By dating carbon paintings paintings were made with you know, and in France, paintings that were made with time are cool. And but even then it's problematic. I think there was an example of some radiocarbon dating done of some Mayan dates, like the Mayan had a calendar right at the end of the world's coming right, blah, blah. Don't buy any of that. But um, the there were these Mayan dates in a cave done in charcoal. So somebody says, Oh, this is gonna be a great way to test the staining. So they, they did set two examples of this, these dates and ran them and they're all way off. But of course, what you're getting into there and see 14 Is contamination. So you have to have really pristine samples. It's quite a science, especially when you pay in 700 bucks. It's shot, which I'm facing. I'd have to get some dates done. It's gonna kill me. But um, yeah, so we're still working on that. But yeah, we can't date them. Now. A lot of the dating we use now we're comparing like, with artifacts in the ground. Yeah.

Speaker 4 1:15:56
You, you share sites, low in the valley. Do you also find rock art sites that are right up in the in the alpine? Oh,

Speaker 2 1:16:05
yeah. Yeah, we do. And yeah, I could have shown some of those 17 sites in the valley. But the most interesting one we came across in the 80s was discovered by a helicopter. And it's about two and a half kilometers up. And it's a cave. Very small cave. Like about the width of that table. Maybe it goes quite a ways in covered inside with paintings. Just brilliant. So yeah, two and a half k up. So conceivably the valley could have it could be tons of sites like that. But just the terrains crazy and difficult.

Speaker 4 1:16:37
Would you say the paintings drawings? Were right in front of you? Or were they up on? Fire?

Speaker 2 1:16:47
Oh, okay. Yeah, both? Yeah, most of them are at face level along the trails. But a lot of those ones I was showing were quite aways up five, five meters. And so how would they get to question? I mean, you go to a site like that is a lot of tree fall, and stuff. And it wouldn't take much effort to kind of move a tree and just scramble up. I mean, look at what rock climbers today, they love the challenge of going up some rock face, you know, like a spy, you know, like, an insect. And people in those days did the same thing. It was just part of their training. Because these were they were training. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, just from from Europeans. Yep. Yeah, and there's two types of glass. And there, there's a green glass from, I think from the 1890s. Because it looks like glass produced at night. And the later glass is probably early 20th century. But you know, no earlier than I mean, it'd be like 1790s tops. And I have a feeling I'm going to be running radiocarbon dates on my stratigraphy there from the bottom up to the top. So I'll have a range of dates, eventually, hopefully, this summer job. Do you think they

Speaker 5 1:18:05
were the artists doing it? So that could be seen? Or were they doing it? Because they needed to do it as an activity on their own? I mean, like it was their intent for it to be displayed to other people, or just do other requests or challenges? Or was it? You know, what? What was any? Did you get the idea from talking to?

Speaker 2 1:18:26
Yeah, yeah, and studying it. It's actually both and it depends on the site. Like, there's some remote places, like, say, this gentleman about the cave, two and a half k up in the Alpine, you know, not a lot of people are gonna be, you know, strolling by the cave there. But, but sites like the one I was looking at the largest sites are all along major travel corridors. panes are definitely meant to be seen by people passing by. And that had to do with their magical qualities like, like I alluded to earlier, that these people were protecting these places and marking them. And so it was important to mark them in and paintings have protected qualities. And I've got accounts, for example of paintings made between two different villages. And the paintings were done to warn, whoever owned that painting of the coming of an enemy. Because it was a connection between the person who made the painting the subject matter the painting, which was a guardian spirit, they believed that there was this you know, network of, of communication that could happen. So there are all these sort of magical qualities involved. But yeah, mostly meant to be seen. But there are examples that they're very remote and hidden. It's just part of the variability of practice. Yeah. Someone would come along later and then copy the same page. Yeah, well, that's it. Yeah, that's sort of what I'm working on. I I might I sort of leave right now that there's two episodes of painting. The first episode had to do with the sort of the the disruption that was being felt in North America and these profits, the activity of profits, and short Nam, per se, and this, so this would be anywhere from, I don't know, 1600 up to 1790s. And then or maybe up to 1850s. And then once the Europeans were in an established everywhere, the paintings were being done by young people that were being sent to these places. And this is where the 19th century ethnographies often talk about these paintings being done by young people who went and trained at these locations. And this has become an orthodoxy in the literature. People say, Oh, well, it says here at 90, the young people did the paintings, they did old paintings. And they sort of centralize a culture gives this idea, this long sort of status, you know, no change over 1000s years, where I'm seeing change I'm seeing, first of all, there's a site with no paintings, then these paintings appear in profusion, and then certain style of paintings. And then there's a later small blip where there were a few people that the populations had crashed. And there were a few families that really made an effort to get their young people out to visit these places. And some of these people made paintings. So I'm trying to tease out the the episodes by this analysis of all the paintings. Yeah. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:20
Oh, yeah. Okay, that's good.

Speaker 3 1:21:22
The shaman went to do the went into wilderness. Yeah. The song is s o n D song. Yeah.

Speaker 2 1:21:33
Pardon me the song s OMG. Yeah. Song like, love it. Yeah, yeah. They heard it in their head. And it was it was came from nature.

Speaker 1 1:21:49
Last year, haven't had a question yet. And then I'll ask you a question.

Speaker 3 1:21:54
Do you have snakes? And that they were dangerous. Does that mean that only people who are spiritually prepared could use this area? Or was there other people? Like coming in contact with those didn't be in danger?

Speaker 2 1:22:19
Yeah, that is an aspect of this. I worked with elders and 80s, as their parents said, they were warned never to go look at the paintings stay away from them. So they have that. And no one would ever camp at any of these sites. And I tried that when it's actually an 80s. You know, because that site, you're looking at very nice, nice, Sandy, beautiful spot two camps. We said, Hey, let's camp here, this would be cool. And as soon as the sun went down, the cliff just took on his dark sort of aspect. And the sound increased, you know, it just got cold. And he said, you know, let's get the heck out of here. And we did we just took down our camp and moved up the river about 100 meters.

Speaker 4 1:22:58
Did you find any chips? On these any rocks in this area? Yeah.

Speaker 2 1:23:04
So you're alluding to petroglyphs, which was just, you know, a technical way to make this stuff. And there's one or two down at the mouth of the sign river. And they're kind of interesting petroglyphs and pictographs. You know, we distinguish between them indigenous people, don't they, they call them by the same term. And, but I think there's a functional difference in where they're located. And, you know, the petroglyphs are kind of more permanent, because when you're, you know, it's reductive. So, you know, they're gonna last forever, basically. So yeah, but there's not a heck of a lot there. And I'm actually doing a study now in the whole lower Fraser area, and very few petroglyphs compared to paintings. So it's sort of a mystery still working on.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:53
Thanks very much, Chris. Very important.

Speaker 1 1:24:01
Before we go, I'd like to thank Nancy and Susan, for their goodies which we can have right at the end of this and Chris will be here for questions if you want to talk to him. And our next meeting is going to be to hedge your family, which is one of the older families in South Korea, they'll be here to present their family history that'll be in February or second Wednesday of February should be very interesting program. And we look forward to seeing you there. And just like to say that we have 81 signed up members now which is probably the highest total we've had for a long time. So thank you very much. And if you haven't signed the guestbook on the way out, you put your name in under designer or under membership, just so we get an idea of how many people come to our meeting. So thank you very much for coming out. We hope you enjoyed your presentation.

Speaker 5 1:24:56
not interesting at all. I'm sorry I have detailed a lot of people looking at rock artists generic

Unknown Speaker 1:25:17
in the local area

Unknown Speaker 1:26:19
is this all shut down No You gotta let it cool down yeah okay I want to login I did

Unknown Speaker 1:26:37
working

Unknown Speaker 1:26:49
at interesting I thought

Unknown Speaker 1:27:00
you did a good job worked out well. Oh yeah