Background Information for Teachers

Native people lived at the site of the Emeryville Shellmound for about 2,400 years.
Archaeologists believe that people stopped living at the shellmound site about 400 years ago, before European explorers arrived.
The shellmound was an archaeological deposit, as tall as a small hill and as large as a football field. The part of the site above the ground surface formed a steep-sided cone.
Most of the shellmound was graded away in 1924, but in 1999 the buried bottom part of the mound was discovered under a factory that was being torn down.
The shellmound, like all archaeological deposits, was composed of the debris left by the people who lived here. This material is called midden. The midden built up a little at a time over a very long period of time, probably mainly as a result of trash and garbage being thrown away. Later, people may intentionally have built up the mound to make it higher and steeper.
The people of the Emeryville Shellmound were hunter-gatherers. They did not farm, but hunted animals, fish and birds, and gathered shellfish and plant foods. They made all their tools of bone, chipped or ground stone, and wood, rather than metal or pottery. They made intricate baskets and were expert at working hides. They lived in villages probably of no more than a few hundred people, in houses made of poles covered with brush, or mats made of tule reeds.
The people of Emeryville probably were the ancestors of the modern Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area.
No one really knows why the mound was built so high. Because so many people were buried there, some Native Americans and archaeologists believe it had a ceremonial purpose. It has been many generations since anyone has lived there and there are no written records from the time the site was occupied.
Archaeologists have no way of knowing what the Emeryville people were thinking, but they can learn about how people lived by studying the archaeological remains of tools, food and work areas. They do this by digging and screening the soil and keeping careful records of what they find. They ask questions about how people lived and try to answer them by studying the artifacts, soil and dietary remains that are found.
Without written history or direct oral tradition (remembered information passed down in spoken history), archaeology is our only source of knowledge about the past. Archaeological sites are like libraries of information.
Learning about people from archaeology is like trying to understand a story when the book has been torn up and the pages scattered. We have to try to make a story that makes sense, from the pages we find, but we can never be sure that we have it right. We put together the pieces we have to try to make reasonable interpretations. Luckily there are many clues in the ground, especially when the part of the site we study has not been disturbed. These give us information about the order in which event happened, and about how things go together.
An extensive archaeological excavation was conducted at the site in 1999. Results are presented in a technical report in this website.
Most of the Emeryville Shellmound was destroyed by commercial and industrial development between 1876 and 1924. Further disturbance occurred with the recent hazardous waste remediation and redevelopment. The City of Emeryville formed a Memorialization Committee to develop ideas about how the site and its people could be commemorated. A 4th grade girl participated in this committee. The design of the Bay Street Project (retail, residential, hotel and entertainment uses) will include art work, a community room that will display materials from the site, and other elements that commemorate the site. The information provided on this webpage is also part of the commemorative effort.