Underground Houses on the British Columbian Coast

1944 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. G. Barnett

Semi-Subterranean houses with an entrance through the roof are a well known feature of the interior of British Columbia, having been described for the Thompson, the Chilcotin, the Shuswap and others of the upper Fraser River valley. They have, in fact, an even wider distribution east of the Coast and Cascade Ranges, extending south over the Plateau and into northern California. Although this type of dwelling existed among the Aleuts, it appears that the coastal people to the south of them, even in Alaska, were either unfamiliar with the pattern or rejected it in favor of others. Sporadically, along the Pacific Coast all the way from California to Bering Sea, house floors were excavated to varying depths, sometimes even to two levels; but, everywhere, the houses characteristically lack the roof entrance and, except for sweathouses in the south and Bering Sea Eskimo dwellings in the north, even the idea of an earth covering is absent. In view of this fundamental divergence, it is interesting that subterranean structures do appear in several places on the coast of British Columbia.

1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. P. Popenoe ◽  
L. R. Saul ◽  
Takeo Susuki

Seven previously described and seven new taxa of gyrodiform naticoids from West Coast Late Cretaceous–Paleocene age strata are discussed. Gyrodes (Gyrodes) dowelli White of Turonian age is a typical Gyrodes; G. robustus Waring from the Paleocene has the shape of Gyrodes s.s. but lacks the crenulations. G. greeni Murphy and Rodda, G. yolensis n. sp., G. quercus n. sp., G. banites n. sp., G. canadensis Whiteaves, G. pacificus n. sp., and G. expansus Gabb comprise the new subgenus Sohlella, which thus ranges from Cenomanian through Maastrichtian. Gyrodes robsauli n. sp. resembles “Polinices” (Hypterita) helicoides (Gray), and Hypterita is reassigned to the Gyrodinae as a subgenus of Gyrodes. Gyrodes onensis n. sp. of Albian age is similar to the G. americanus group of Sohl (1960). Three texa—Natica allisoni (Murphy and Rodda) of Cenomanian age and N. conradiana Gabb and N. conradiana vacculae n. subsp. of Turonian age—which have all been previously considered to be Gyrodes are placed in Natica. Well marked relict color patterns on N. conradiana and N. conradiana vacculae suggest that these naticids from northern California and southern British Columbia were tropical forms.Diversity of taxa and size of specimens are reduced at the end of the Turonian, suggesting a change in West Coast marine conditions at that time.


Author(s):  
Edward R. Slack

Called “Mar del Sur” [South Sea] when first spotted by Balboa in 1513 and dubbed “Mar Pacifíco” [Peaceful Calm Sea] by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, the historical relationship between the Pacific Ocean and the people of Mexico is multilayered and dynamic. During the Spanish colonial era (1521–1821), the viceroyalty of New Spain (Nueva España) supervised the Asian and Polynesian colonies of the Philippines and Guam (and briefly Taiwan and the Spice island of Ternate) across the Pacific. Acapulco became a mythical emporium of exotic luxury supplied by the galleons from Manila that for 250 years tied Asia to the Iberian New World. Beyond this famous port, littoral native communities dotting the Pacific coast, from Oaxaca in the south to the forty-second parallel of Alta California in the north, gradually fell under Spanish secular and religious control. The enormous coastline measured approximately 5,400 miles, more than double the length of seaside territory facing the Gulf of Mexico. Following the War of Mexican Independence (1810–1821), the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) emerged. For the next fifty years, Mexico experienced domestic political instability exacerbated by wars against the United States (Mexican-American War, 1846–1848) and France (1862–1867). When political order was finally established under the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), regionalism was confronted by the centrifugal power of a modernizing, technocratic state. Despite losing 840 miles of California coastline, and a lucrative trade route with Manila, in the Mexican-American War, Mexico’s Pacific littoral in the south grew to incorporate the formerly Guatemalan territory of Chiapas, and a new shipping network evolved. Traditional research on pueblos, cities, or states along the Pacific coast emphasizes purely local or regional contexts within the colonial or independent Mexican state; or it is grouped thematically into studies about the galleon trade or California mission settlements. Recent scholarship is encouraging a more balanced approach, accentuating the many threads that wove a rich tapestry of Mexico’s unique relationship with the “Pacific World” (as opposed to the more popular “Atlantic World”); not only in a nationalist framework, but with inter-American and trans-Pacific or global dimensions.


1961 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. D. Williams

Xiphinema bakeri n. sp. is described from soil associated with the roots of raspberry and strawberry plants. The specimens were collected near Hatzic, in the South Fraser River Valley, British Columbia. This species most closely resembles X. index Thorne and Allen, 1950, but is distinguished from the latter by its greater length, longer spear, more anteriorly placed vulva, and the presence in the female of only two pairs of caudal pores.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 743-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Considering that it was summertime, the weather in New England was puzzlingly cold. Nonetheless, the men in the seabeaten wooden ship offered thanks, in the Protestant fashion, for the bounty of fresh provisions: oysters and seals; vast herds of deer, tule elk, and pronghorn. Mutual curiosity informed their encounters with the people they met. The English admired their extraordinary basketwork, their shell ornaments, their headpieces of brilliant black condor feathers.If the bio- and ethnoscapes of this New England sketch seem a little off, it is because I have moved its longitudal coordinates west by fifty degrees and spun the time setting of an originary North American encounter back by several decades. The English sailors and supplicants were not Puritan separatists but the remainder of Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation expedition, which made landfall along the Pacific coast—by most estimates, in northern California—in 1579. The story of their several weeks' stay there is speculative in many senses. The fortuitously named Golden Hind returned loaded with treasure; the marker that Drake supposedly placed near his landfall buttressed unfulfilled English territorial claims for many years after; and in our own day historians, anthropologists, and geographers both trained and untrained continue to debate the precise location of Nova Albion. This is the very stuff of which counterfactual histories and speculative historical fictions are made: what if other Englishmen had later returned with settlers and supplies? If the English colonial project along the North American Pacific had rooted itself earlier, and farther south than Vancouver, would its later pattern of settlement have pulsed west to east across the continent instead of east to west?


1968 ◽  
Vol 1 (11) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Morrough P. O'Brien ◽  
Leonardo Zeevaert

Estero Punta Banda on the Pacific Coast of Baja California was to be improved and stabilized as a small boat harbor by the construction of twin jetties. The throat area-tidal prism relationship at this entrance agreed with that of other inlets on sandy coasts in equilibrium. This throat area was retained in the jetty spacing. The major question to be resolved was whether to retain the entrance in its present position at the north end of the lagoon or to cut a new entrance at the south end. The former position was chosen.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brown ◽  
Henry Davis ◽  
Michael Schwan ◽  
Barbara Sennott

Gitksan (git) is an Interior Tsimshianic language spoken in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. It is closely related to Nisga'a, and more distantly related to Coast Tsimshian and Southern Tsimshian. The specific dialect of Gitksan presented here is what can be called Eastern Gitksan, spoken in the villages of Kispiox (Ansbayaxw), Glen Vowell (Sigit'ox), and Hazelton (Git-an'maaxs), which contrasts with the Western dialects, spoken in the villages of Kitwanga (Gitwingax), Gitanyow (Git-anyaaw), and Kitseguecla (Gijigyukwhla). The primary phonological differences between the dialects are a lexical shift in vowels and the presence of stop lenition in the Eastern dialects. While there exists a dialect continuum, the primary cultural and political distinction drawn is between Eastern and Western Gitksan. For reference, Gitksan is bordered on the west by Nisga'a, in the south by Coast Tsimshian and Witsuwit'en, in the east by Dakelh and Sekani, and in the north by Tahltan (the latter four of these being Athabaskan languages).


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-411
Author(s):  
Chris Madsen

Henry Eccles, in classic studies on logistics, describes the dynamics of strategic procurement in the supply chain stretching from home countries to military theatres of operations. Naval authorities and industrialists concerned with Japanese aggression before and after Pearl Harbor looked towards developing shipbuilding capacity on North America’s Pacific Coast. The region turned into a volume producer of merchant vessels, warships and auxiliaries destined for service in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Shipbuilding involved four broad categories of companies in the United States and Canada that enabled the tremendous production effort.


1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian F. Atwater ◽  
Alan R. Nelson ◽  
John J. Clague ◽  
Gary A. Carver ◽  
David K. Yamaguchi ◽  
...  

Earthquakes in the past few thousand years have left signs of land-level change, tsunamis, and shaking along the Pacific coast at the Cascadia subduction zone. Sudden lowering of land accounts for many of the buried marsh and forest soils at estuaries between southern British Columbia and northern California. Sand layers on some of these soils imply that tsunamis were triggered by some of the events that lowered the land. Liquefaction features show that inland shaking accompanied sudden coastal subsidence at the Washington-Oregon border about 300 years ago. The combined evidence for subsidence, tsunamis, and shaking shows that earthquakes of magnitude 8 or larger have occurred on the boundary between the overriding North America plate and the downgoing Juan de Fuca and Gorda plates. Intervals between the earthquakes are poorly known because of uncertainties about the number and ages of the earthquakes. Current estimates for individual intervals at specific coastal sites range from a few centuries to about one thousand years.


2012 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Beck ◽  
George T. Jones

AbstractFiedel and Morrow challenge our argument that Clovis technology originated in the southern Plains or Southeast and from there was carried by populations migrating north. Upon entering the Intermountain West relatively late, they encountered a population utilizing a different technology (Western Stemmed), the latter having arrived independently from the Pacific coast. Fiedel and Morrow offer arguments in favor of Clovis-first in the Intermountain West and coastal California and against the coastal route, Clovis origins in the south, and technological differences between Clovis and Western Stemmed. We evaluate these arguments and find their supporting evidence, when provided, meager and unconvincing.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document