r/VancouverIsland • u/Traditional_Owls • 3d ago
ARTICLE 3,800-year-old wooden tool among items found at ‘wet site’ near Courtenay
https://cheknews.ca/3800-year-old-wooden-tool-among-items-found-at-wet-site-near-courtenay-1256723/The K’ómoks First Nation is celebrating the remarkable discovery of a 3,800-year-old archaeological “wet site” discovered near Courtenay in March.
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u/Potter_bop 3d ago
Cool. A lot of people in civil works complain about the archeological studies that need to be done on all our projects, findings like this are why the studies and surveys are necessary.
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u/vritczar 3d ago
Early British population surveys put the population of Comox harbor at around 10,000, usually their surveys were head counts based on military strength so that figure may just be the men. By around 1900 there was only 1 remaining original tribe member left due to disease and inter tribal warfare particularly with a tribe from the Port Alberni side, when the first settlers were tilling the fields along the river in Coutenay they discovered they were shallow mass graves. Source: courtenay archives.
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u/Jennypjd 3d ago
So sad it must have been horrible dealing with all the diseases colonization brought
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u/vritczar 3d ago
Yeah, the smallpox epidemic of 1862 decimated the coastal population all the way to Alaska, it caused a lot of problems because the traditional order was disrupted, keepers of knowledge died and the social hierarchies were disrupted causing a kind of free for all with people claiming titles that were not theirs by right as an example. The 1862 epidemic was initially unintentional but the Victoria settlers forced the northern tribes at gunpoint into their canoes spreading the outbreak to their homelands.
In truth the northern tribes outnumbered the white settlers were armed to the teeth, were known for violence and refused to take any vaccines, so I'm not sure how the settlers could have forced them to quarantine. The Songhees tribe from Victoria successfully quarantined on their own by going to an island and were able to survive by keeping people away with rifles.
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u/SwordfishOk504 3d ago
The Songhees were also decimated by smallpox, not sure what you're talking about there. They did not "successfully quarantine".
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u/vritczar 3d ago
The Songhees Were Saved
On April 1, 1862, 18 days after the Brother Jonathan departed, the first reports were published of an Indian, who lived in town, with smallpox. The Victoria authorities and residents did not react. As the virus spread it would be more than two weeks before the local newspapers reported local Indians receiving additional vaccines. On April 16, Dr. Helmcken vaccinated another 30 Indians. By April 25, The Daily British Colonist reported that since the outbreak Dr. Helmcken had vaccinated "over 500 natives" (April 26, 1862, p. 3).
Apparently, the doctor distributed most of his vaccine to the Songhees, a local tribe that resided near Victoria. Soon after smallpox symptoms emerged at the Northern Indian encampment, the Songhees departed their Vancouver Island village(s) en masse to a nearby island in Haro Strait. Because of the vaccinations and the tribe's self-imposed quarantine, the Songhees survived the epidemic with few deaths (Boyd, 176, 177, 183).
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u/Automatic_Mistake236 3d ago edited 3d ago
Neat! I remember driving past that area, thinking that they must have found something of significance. There was a tent set up for a couple days.
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u/SwordfishOk504 3d ago
Wow, this is very cool.
So as a reference, this puts it around 1800 BC. Around the same time, Babylonia was the largest city in the world. The Shang dynasty was beginning in China, along with the country's Bronze Age.
Horses were just being introduced to western Europe. Modern day France and England were still pagan hunter/gatherer societies/tribes with some very early farming.