Pompeii. Machu Picchu. Stonehenge. Angkor Wat. The Great Pyramid of Giza.
Those of us who grew up in Western cultures tend to think of archaeology as the study of a place — a point on the map where edifices or artifacts tell us something important about past people and cultures.
Archaeologists have tended to think this way, too. A site is identified; excavation ensues. Artifacts are discovered. The artifacts are studied, inventoried and carefully stored so that they will be available to the archaeologists of the future.
But what if the sacred relic that illuminates the past was neither a building nor an object? What if it was a trail?
In this issue, we explore the efforts of Indigenous people in British Columbia to document and preserve trails that are records of their history and culture — records created through millennia of movement across the landscape. Social sciences writer Sujata Gupta traveled to northwestern Canada to observe efforts to mark the ancient Babine Trail network, which people used to carry goods from the coast to inland communities. Participants in the project include members of the local Gitxsan people, archaeologists and graduate students.
“It’s a part of the world I’ve never been to, and it’s absolutely stunning,” Gupta told me. “Because it’s so far north, white settlers arrived late, and Indigenous communities remain strong.”
It was an apt assignment for Gupta; before becoming a journalist, she worked at national parks and preserves including Haleakala National Park on Maui, Acadia National Park in Maine and the Mojave National Preserve in California, where she became fascinated by the parks’ human history. “My park rangering days were very long ago,” she says, “but I was always very interested in culture and anthropology.”
In British Columbia, the mapping group used very old and very new technologies to locate the overgrown trail. The old: using oral history to spot and tag vestiges of trail markers, including blazes cut into tree bark. The new: maps made using lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses lasers on aircraft or satellites to reveal subtle differences in Earth’s surface. The ease of mapping remote areas with lidar (compared with, say, thrashing through the wilderness on foot) has accelerated a shift in archaeology’s focus from individual sites to landscapes, even as the technology also proved to be a boon for research at traditional sites such as the ancient Maya city of Caracol in Belize (SN: 12/2/23, p. 24).
There’s more at stake here than a deeper understanding of the Indigenous people and their ancestral land. A planned natural gas pipeline would run through the Babine Trail, and access roads and construction would impact the landscape far beyond the trail itself. Participants in the trail-mapping project hope that their work will help persuade the provincial government to block, reroute or delay pipeline construction. But that may hinge on whether the government sees the region’s cultural heritage as an artifact or as something much bigger: a landscape where people wrote history with their feet.