Clam Digging through 3,500 Years of Indigenous History | Hakai Magazine
To the untrained eye, the rows of rocks piled near the tideline on British Columbia’s Quadra Island could easily be dismissed as the constructions of bored beachgoers. But new research using radiocarbon dating and analyses of ancient landscapes reveals that these rock walls are the remnants of a technology at least 3,500 years old—evidence of an aquaculture system known as clam gardens that once helped feed a much larger population of coastal Indigenous peoples.