Archaeological shell middens along the Olympic Peninsula's shores and rivers, accumulated layers of shell, bone, and charcoal from village life, document continuous human occupation stretching back many thousands of years. These deep, stratified deposits record the diet and daily life of Indigenous communities and confirm one of the longest unbroken human presences on the Northwest Coast.
Here's how deep human time runs on this peninsula. Along these shores and rivers lie middens, great mounded layers of shell and bone and charcoal, the kitchen leavings of villages built up grain by grain over thousands upon thousands of years. Dig into one and you read the menu of a whole age: clam shells, fish bones, the ash of countless fires. Some of these sites hold a record going back many thousands of years, unbroken. People haven't just passed through this country. They have lived here, in the same good spots, since the ice pulled back.
Photo: Konrad Roeder (Kgrr) · CC BY 3.0
