The Significance of the Fauna from the Charlie Lake Cave Site

Article Summary by Jonathan C. Driver, May 2015 This paper and The Prehistory of Charlie Lake Cave by Knut R. Fladmark, are excerpts from Early Human Occupation in British Columbia, an archaeological book published in 1996. In 1988 the annual meeting of the Canadian Archaeological Association was held in Whistler, B.C. As part of the meeting, Roy Carlson, a professor at SFU, organized a symposium on the early human presence in British Columbia. Knut Fladmark and I each gave a paper on our work at Tse’K’wa, based on the 1983 excavation season. Although it was intended to publish the book quickly, there were various delays, and Fladmark and I went back to Tse’K’wa in 1990 and 1991 before the proceedings of the Whistler symposium were finally published in 1996. We updated our papers slightly based on the later excavations, but both of these papers really reflect our thinking prior to the full analysis of the material from 1990 and 1991. Fladmark’s paper is a good introduction to the location and geology of the site, and it provides an account of the cultural materials recovered in 1983. Driver’s paper summarizes the animal bones from the 1983 excavations, and devotes more time to considering how the wide variety of animals were brought to the site. I noted that the bison bone was found in locations with lower amounts of small mammals and birds and suggested that most of the smaller animals were brought to the site by non-human predators, such as owls.