The Salish Nephrite/Jade Industry: Ground Stone Celt Production in British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the patterns of ground stone celt production in pre-contact southwestern British Columbia (3500 BP–ad 1770) and to offer hypotheses to explain those patterns derived from Coast and Interior Salish ethnographies. The mineralogy of celt production debris and celts was determined using a portable near-infrared spectrometer, and the resulting data mapped using GIS. The spatial distribution of such artifacts clearly indicates that celt production was a highly localized activity in a few centers along the Fraser River, with very little evidence of celt production anywhere else in the Salish British Columbia. Based on this evidence, it is clear that celts were exported in large numbers from very few communities and supplied a market of many hundreds of communities. The patterns evident in such data provide further resolution to the directionality and volume of exchange between celt producing and celt receiving communities. A number of avenues for increasing the volume of production of nephrite celts are explored against the archaeological record. I suggest that elites in nephrite source areas were well-positioned to sponsor or intensify the production of stone celts for export to distant exchange partners.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisory committee: David Pokotylo, Michael Blake, and Zhichun Jing, the staff at: the University of British Columbia Laboratory of Archaeology, the Simon Fraser University Museum of Ethnology, the Royal British Columbia Museum Archaeology Collections, the Canadian Museum of History Archaeology Collections, the Penticton Museum, the Vancouver City Museum, the Sto:lo Research and Resource Management Centre, B.C. nephrite miners: Kirk Makepeace, George Vanderwolf, Peter Deverell, and my lovely wife and kids. This research was supported by SSHRC Award 767-2007-2014.

Notes on Contributors

Jesse Morin is an independent research consultant who works closely with First Nations in Canada summarizing evidence of their Aboriginal rights and title. His earlier research (at the University of British Columbia) included projects on both the coast and interior of British Columbia, focusing on trade and exchange and social organization. Lithic technology has always been the primary topical focus of his research. Jesse is currently actively researching the archaeology of the Burrard Inlet area, focusing on occupation chronology, rock art, defensive sites, and canoe travel.

Notes

1 The “Y” designation refers to an entire Borden Unit, the spatial units by which archaeological sites are recorded in Canada. Artifacts reported from an area within Borden Unit, but not a specific site, are designated with the “Y” rather than a site number.

2 It is important to note that Wolf and Cannibal societies are specified as being obtained from the Coast around 1855 (Teit 1909:581). Similarly, the Xway-xway mask, almost always associated with the Coast Salish, has been identified archaeologically on the Plateau (Sanger 1969) but is completely absent in Plateau ethnographies. This is part of a region-wide process of diffusion and replacement of secret societies across the Pacific Northwest. This includes the famous Ha'matsa (i.e., Cannibal) of the Kwakiutl replacing the Ha'mshamtses around 1850 (Boas 1895:424), and the Kisiut of the Bella Coola replacing the older A'alk society (McIlwraith 1992b:10). These coastal references to the activities of secret societies are particularly relevant to the present discussion because: (1) they (especially Boas (1895) and McIlwraith (1992a, 1992b)) are by far the most detailed descriptions of secret society activities, and (2) they are broadly the same secret societies described by Teit (1909). Suffice it to say, Teit's (1900, 1906, 1909) valuable ethnographic work cannot be taken as an exhaustive description of secret societies on the Plateau.