[Interviewer:] You were saying only 10% of materials from a culture were left in an archaeological site?

[Owens:] In terms of the objects people used on a day-to-day basis, probably 95% or more of those items were made of wood or other perishable materials like grasses, reeds, bark. Those don't preserve well in an archaeological record. Our soils are very acidic and the bacteria that lives in the soils, eat up, essentially, those artifacts. As an archaeologist, I'm looking at only 5% of the objects that people used on a daily basis and those are going to be primarily stone and then bone and antler.

If you are working at an archaeology site that has a lot of shell, a shell midden, the shell is alkaline so it helps to stabilize the PH of the soil and you get greater preservation than you would if it was in a shellless deposit. Even there, the wood and bark and grass won't preserve. There is specific wet site material; this is cultural deposits that are anaerobic. Bacteria can't survive the wet nature of the deposit. This allows for the preservation of wood and bark and reeds that wouldn't otherwise be present in the archaeological record.

Wet sites are particularly important for an archaeologist because it allows us to look at those kinds of artifacts and objects. We're talking about everything from tools used in food preparation, carving house posts, canoes, baskets, boxes, shafts for arrows and spears, almost endless. So, wet sites are particularly important. In fact, in the Nanaimo area there are no wet sites recorded to date so our understanding of the archaeological record of the area is really limited to that 5% of the artifactual material.

We also have features to work with and stratigraphy. Features are non-movable products, so if I dig a hole in the ground and fill it in, the soil in the filled-in hole will look different than that around it. But, if I dig all that up, I don't have anything left; I just have a bunch of sand. Whereas with an artifact, if you dig it up, you can take it and it is still an artifact. So, we look not only at the artifacts, but also, the layers in the ground, the stratigraphy, and we look for features like a post hole - you dig a hole and put a post in and then fill the hole in again, you can still see the shadow of the hole. We try and look at the relationship between those features and artifacts and food remains like the shells, the bones from animals that were hunted for either food or raw materials.