I 



ON THE ETHNOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA. 493 



employed, from the remains of ancient peoples elsewhere. Many stone 

 arrow and spear points have been picked up on the beach adjacent to the 

 heaps, from which they have been obviously washed by the action of the 

 tides, which have at some points almost demolished the midden piles. 

 Jade or nephrite adzes, axes, and chisels have also been picked up in the 

 same vicinity ; and lai'ge numbers of spear and arrow heads ' in the 

 rough ' are unearthed from time to time. These latter were apparently 

 hoards or magazines. They can be picked up on the northern shore of 

 Stanley Park at low tide by the score. They are not to be confounded 

 with the waste chips of the arrow maker's workshop so characteristic of 

 some prehistoric camp sites. They are clearly the raw material of the 

 spear and arrow point maker, all showing evidence of having been skilfully 

 broken for the pui'pose from water-worn boulders of dark basalt. No 

 one could mistake their purpose — their outlines are too obvious. In 

 form, material, and colour they differ radically from the ordinary pebbles 

 and stones of the beach. 



As these old middens in the Sk'qo'mic territory resemble in most of 

 their features, except extent and mass, the great middens of the Lower 

 Fraser, I would refer those who desire to learn more of them to my 

 paper on ' Prehistoric Man in British Columbia,' published in the ' Trans- 

 actions ' of the Royal Society of Canada for 1896, in which I have treated 

 of these middens at some length. 



Since the Sk-qd'mic have come under the influence of the missionaiies 

 they have not only buried their dead in proper graveyards, but have 

 also gathered up and interred in the same place such remains of their 

 dead as could be recovered from their former burial-places. It is difficult, 

 therefore, to secure anatomical material from this region. Some ten or 

 twelve years ago, when the Vancouver City authorities were making the 

 road which now runs round the edge of the penisula which constitutes 

 Stanley Park, they opened one of the larger of the later or Salish 

 middens, utilising the material for the road bed. A considerable number 

 of skeletons was disinterred from the midden mass during the operation, 

 the larger bones and crania of which were gathered up and placed in 

 boxes which were afterwards hidden in the forest where I discovered 

 them a few years later. The crania had then fallen to pieces. A boxful 

 of these bones I shipped later to the Dom. Geol. Survey Museum 

 at Ottawa. From the fact of these bones being found thus inhumated 

 as well as from the recovery of a skeleton in a fair state of 

 preservation in the same heap by myself, it would seem to appear that 

 burial by inhumation sometimes took place in former times even by the 

 Sk'qo'mic themselves, though this was not the prevailing custom when 

 we first came into contact with them. There is, however, no record of 

 burials of this kind in the tribal recollection that I could learn, the 

 traditional method of burial being that already described in my mortuary 

 notes, and it is quite possible these burials in the midden mass were 

 due to the presence of some pestilence or epidemic such as their traditions 

 speak of, and such as we know on good testimony caused the inhumation 

 of a large number of corpses in the Hammond midden on the Fraser 

 a few generations ago. The tribe inhabiting this district was almost 

 decimated by small-pox. So terrible was the scourge that they abandoned 

 their village site after burying all their dead in a big hole. In digging 

 the foundations of his house, the rancher who now owns this spot came 

 upon this pit of bones, and in consequence chose another site for his 



