Srcrion II., 1895. [108 | Trans. R.S. C. 
VI. Later Prehistoric Man in British Columbia. 

By CHARLES Hizz-Tour. 
— 
(Communicated by Dr. G. M. Dawson, May 15, 1895.) 
The following notes and observations on some ancient British Col- 
umbian middens and tumuli in the vicinity of the Lower Fraser are 
offered in the hope that they may be found to possess some ethnological 
value, and also with the desire to call forth a wider and more active 
interest in these vanishing and, for the most part, unrecorded vestiges of 
a distant past. The writer’s explorations among these melancholy monu- 
ments have led him to believe that we possess in them valuable records of 
the prehistoric conditions of the aborigines of this section of the Pacific 
slope and of their antiquity in that region. The middens of Europe and 
of the Atlantic seaboard, and the mounds of the great central and east- 
ern valleys, have long been classic ground to the archeologist, and much 
labour and attention have been profitably bestowed upon them ; but the 
middens and tumuli of British Columbia are as yet but little known to 
him, and have not up to this time, I think, received any serious or sys- 
tematic attention at his hands. Yet the tumuli herein described consti- 
tute a distinct type of their own, with many interesting and unique fea- 
tures about them ; and the midden from which the relies figured in the 
accompanying plates, I., IT., IIL, were taken exceeds in mass and area 
the largest middens of Denmark, and abounds in interesting ethnological 
data. This particular midden, for which the name “(Great Fraser Mid- 
den” has been suggested by the writer, is upwards of 1,400 feet in length 
and 300 feet in breadth ; and covers to an average depth of about 5, and 
to a maximum depth of over 15, feet an area exceeding 45 acres in extent, 
It is composed of the remains of shells, mostly of the clam (Tridacna, sp.) 
and mussel (Mytilus edulis ?), intermingled with ashes and other human 
refuse matter. It is situated on the right bank of the north arm of the 
Fraser a few miles up from its present mouth and opposite the alluvial 
islands called Sea and Lulu Islands. The existence of so extensive a 
midden, composed so largely of the remains of shell-fish that belong to 
salt water, at such an unusual distance from the nearest clam and 
mussel-bearing beds of to-day, was for a time a puzzle to me. I could 
perceive no satisfactory reason why these midden-makers should have 
chosen this particular site for their camping-ground instead of one five or 
six miles farther down the bank and nearer to the present source of sup- 
ply of these much-coveted dainties of their larder. And upon discovery, 
a little later, of other middens still higher up the river by fifteen or six- 
