The oldest known sites in the Nanaimo area are about 4000 years old. That's considerably younger than sites found in other areas in the province. There are sites dating 9000 years in the lower mainland area. Certainly 6 and 7000 years in other sites. I think this is more of a problem with the inventory, what's known about the Nanaimo area rather than a reflection on whether or not people were here. We know that on the Fraser to the north, to the south and to the west of the Nanaimo area, the eastern side of Vancouver Island to the south of that area, that there are old sites present and reported. I think, given the phenomenal environment on the east coast of Vancouver Island, there is no reason people would not want to live there.

This is probably more a reflection of what is known than the actual length of occupation. There are probably a couple of reasons for this. Most of the work that has been done by archaeologists in the area has been coastal, shoreline oriented and not a lot of survey has been done inland. The shoreline sites can be a lot easier to see. Large shell middens running a kilometre or more are pretty easy to see eroding from the bank. Whereas the inland sites might be smaller and more scattered and harder to find. I think that we really haven't looked for them all that well.

I think the fact that there are no recorded wet sites in the Nanaimo area is an example of that. They are there, they just haven't been found yet. The other thing I think might be going on is with sea level history. The sea level history in the area of Nanaimo is not very well known. It's quite likely that older sites are now submerged; the sea level has risen and the old sites are now under water and we don't have access to them.

When the glaciers were retreating and the weight of that ice left the land, it took time for the land to bounce back from that weight. It bounced back at different rates in different areas, and on top of that, you had the release of huge volumes of water that were then flooding the land, and then the land would move again and it wasn't so much sea levels that were changing, but the land would go up and the sea level would go up. There is this complex relationship between the rebound of the earth and the weight of the ice and the volume of water. The history isn't really well known in the Nanaimo area, but it is likely that it [the sea level] was lower prior to 4000 years ago so sites that are older than this, 5000 to 9000 years, are actually under water.