What Happened to the Ohlone Shellmounds?

Bay Curious

KQED

History, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.9 • 999 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shellmounds are man-made mounds of earth and organic matter that were built up by humans over thousands of years. They were created by the people native to the San Francisco Bay Area. One archeologist estimated there were more than 425 shellmounds in the Bay Area at one point. Paul Gilbert wants to know what happened to them. Additional Reading There Were Once More Than 425 Shellmounds in the Bay Area. Where Did They Go? Who Were the First People to Live in the Bay Area? Court rules a 260-unit apartment complex can go up at 1900 Fourth St., a site the Ohlone consider sacred Reported by Laura Klivans. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and Brendan Willard. Additional support from Kyana Moghadam, Jessica Placzek, Natalia Aldana, Carly Severn, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, Ethan Lindsey, Vinnee Tong and Jenny Pritchett.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From K-QED. Every week we hear at Bay Curious get dozens of questions that come in from our
0:07.8	listeners. And recently we've received a lot of them about the people who have lived
0:12.3	on this land for thousands of years now
0:15.1	commonly called the Aloney. Today we're bringing you an episode about an Aloney
0:19.3	practice that you can still see some signs of around the Bay Area, the building of Shell Mounds.
0:24.6	It first aired in 2018.
0:27.0	To get us started, I headed to the East Bay.
0:37.2	I'm at the corner of Shell Mound Street and a lonely way in Emryville and I'm looking at a P.F. Chang's Bistro, a Banana Republic, an Ikea just a couple blocks away.
0:43.7	But right here at this intersection,
0:45.4	there's also something you might just completely
0:48.1	miss the first time you walk by.
0:49.9	There's a small mound.
0:52.3	It's like if you covered a Volkswagen bus with soil. And a little bit
0:56.7	away, there's a memorial that says, Bay Street Emryville was a shell mound site.
1:03.8	Now this street, shell mound street, and this mound
1:06.8	caught the attention of our question-asker Paul Gilbert.
1:10.0	He wanted to know.
1:11.1	What's the story behind Shell Mound Street in Emoryville?
1:16.0	And what happened to the Native American Shell Mounds that I heard it was named after. This is Bay Curious, the podcast that explores the Bay Area one question at a time.
1:30.0	I'm Olivia Alan Price.
1:32.0	This week we're talking about Shell Mounds, the sacred sites where
1:35.6	Aloney would bury their ancestors. It's a complex story, thousands of years in the making,
	...

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