What archaeology of the Seymour Valley reveals

During the early 1900s the area in North Vancouver’s Seymour Valley now known as the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve was home to a wide range of activities, which many could probably guess included logging, but there were also houses, rental cabins, small stores, places to get a cup of tea, and work camps. Some of these were legal, but many were not, leaving little or no paper trail of their existence in the now dense forest.

For 13 of the past 20 summers I have directed more than 200 archaeology students from Capilano University locating and excavating some of these remains. The most recent excavations were in 2019, continuing work at a settlement of Japanese Canadians.

Excavations indicate the site was originally established as a logging camp for Japanese Canadians and used as such for a few years around 1920. Finding a Japanese logging camp is interesting but not surprising, as Japanese were prominent in forestry in the province at that time. It also isn’t the only Japanese logging camp we have discovered operational around that time in the valley.

What makes this site especially interesting is that once logging in the area ceased in the early 1920s, some Japanese Canadians probably numbering about 50 evidently continued to live there until their forced relocation (along with all other people of Japanese descent in the coastal region of the province) away from the coast, mostly incarcerated in internment camps, in 1942.   

The settlement is about the size of a football field, but most people today would have difficulty knowing there was ever human activity there such is the decay and burning of the original wooden buildings and the amount of forest growth that has occurred over the past several decades. The archaeology students and I have identified the locations of at least a dozen small houses, a bathhouse, an elevated wooden platform supported by stone walls, a water reservoir, a garden, and a solid wood road.

Research has not yet revealed any memories or written records of the site, except for some forestry records giving permission for a Japanese man (E. Kagetsu) to log nearby area in 1920, and correspondence with this man’s son indicating his father did establish a camp close by.

Evidence that people continued living there after its initial use as a logging camp is substantial, but circumstantial. The large number of personal and household items left behind, such as timepieces, lanterns and unbroken dishes, is unusual but makes sense when considering that people of Japanese descent were permitted to take very little when being relocated.

Similarly, an expensive cook stove was hidden on the periphery of the site, and a camera in the bathhouse was probably hidden, consistent with stories of people hiding items of value in preparation for relocation. The existence of the wood road also supports the idea of ongoing use after logging. Wooden roads such as this were routinely removed when camps were abandoned in the 1920s.

This site has recently received considerable coverage in national and international media, with stories about it appearing in at least five different languages and being ranked as the top archaeology story of 2019 in Smithsonian Magazine.

People often ask what happens to the artifacts we collect. Curators from the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby and the North Vancouver Museum and Archives recently visited Capilano University to view the collections, and choose artifacts for their own collections. The selected artifacts will be transferred to these museums shortly. The remainder will be stored by MetroVancouver, which has jurisdiction for the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve and has been very supportive of the project.

For those interested in learning more, I am giving a public lecture on my 20 years of archaeology in the Seymour Valley on May 14^th from 7:00 – 8:45 p.m. in the Bosa Theatre at Capilano University.

 Bob Muckle teaches archaeology at Capilano University in North Vancouver.