Shellmounds in the Bay Area overview
Over the course of thousands of years, Ohlone and Coast Miwok people constructed more than 425 shell mounds throughout the Bay Area, burying funerary remains and cultural artifacts beneath layers of soil and shell alongside their village sites near the creeks and marshes of the region. Sometimes rising over 30 feet tall, the shellmounds served many purposes. They were funerary and ceremonial sites, village sites, high points in the flatlands by which to navigate the waterways and from which to lookout and communicate with neighboring villages.
“Shellmounds are places where we laid our ancestors to rest,” explained Corrina Gould, spokesperson for the Conferated Villages of Lisjan, one of many Ohlone tribes in the region. “We actually buried them in the soil and then covered them with shell and then more soil. As the years and centuries went by, these mounds grew larger and larger. They became monuments to the people that lived here in the Bay Area.”
The shellmounds have been largely destroyed by ongoing settler-colonial violence in the region. Many were leveled by early settlers, their material used to fill wetlands, pave roads or sell admission tickets for museums. Thousands of cultural artifacts and the remains of more than 5000 Ohlone people were taken by UC Berkeley and are currently held by the institution at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Much of what remains of these ancient monuments is currently entombed beneath concrete, asphalt and commercial or residential development.
Ohlone survivors have been working to protect the remains of the ancient shellmounds. Campaigns have aimed to protect the Emeryville Shellmound from destruction by Bay Street developers (1997), Vallejo’s Sogorea-te (2011), and the West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site (2016-present).
Alameda Shellmounds
There were six shellmounds on the peninsula that is now the island of Alameda, according to historian Imelda Merlin. “Four mounds were found east of Park Street and two others between Park and Chestnut streets.”
Sather Mound
The largest of the ancient monuments covered about three acres, measuring about 400 feet by 100 feet, and was 14 feet high at its apex. The mound contained centuries of human burials -- more than 450 individuals were disinterred in 1908, when developers in Alameda bisected the ancient cemetery and heritage site in order to extend Santa Clara Ave and Mound Street. This Chochenyo Ohlone shellmound was referred to as the “Sather Mound,” after the gold rush banker Peder Sather, who'd purchased the property from the notorious Indian killer and Texas Ranger-turned-real estate mogul Jack Hays. Sather leased the land to Alameda Methodists, who opened the first white school there, dubbed the Oak Grove Institute. When the school eventually fell behind on their lease payments, the banker Sather evicted them and moved into the former schoolhouse with his family for a time, before moving again after his son died.
Graverobbers
By the 1890s, the mound and the land around it was fenced in and leased by the Sather's heirs to local farmers named Young Jling and Young Son (sp). In 1890, some local children reportedly found a human skull on the property and “played football with it.” In 1892, a reporter from the San Francisco Daily Call received tentative permission from the Sather heirs to excavate a portion of the site, as long as he also received permission from the farmers. The white journalist did not seek permission from the Chinese farmers, citing a racist concern about “oriental superstition”, and began excavation anyway, hiring two laborers to dig while he watched. He took several artifacts from the ancient cemetery and destroyed several others. Following his report in the Daily Call on his “Big Archaeological Catch,” San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences sent a team to continue excavating the mound, taking many artifacts and skeletons from it.
The mound was finally flattened in 1908 when laborers extended Santa Clara Ave and Mound Street, the intersection of which cut through the mound at approximately its center. During the destruction, workers reportedly found the remains of more than 450 individuals. The mound was commemorated with a plaque erected in Lincoln Park in 1914.
Remains from the ancient burial mound continue to be disinterred from the site to this day. In 2009, a crew with Alameda’s Public Works Department unearthed the remains of a Native American child about 3 or 4 years old in the 3000 block of Washington Street. In 2013, a worker doing repaving work on the 1400 block of Mound Street found part of a skull and other smaller fragments. As recently as 2018, a construction worker on Mound St found the remains of an adult man there.
References
Merlin, Imelda. Alameda: A Geographical History. Alameda, CA: Friends of the Alameda Free Library, 1977. Print. pages 19-21 Library call number: Ref. 979.34652 Merlin
