The Emeryville Shellmound: Five Thousand Years Under a Mall

Beneath the parking lots and department stores of Emeryville's Bay Street shopping center lie the remains of the most significant Indigenous monument on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. For roughly two thousand eight hundred years, from around eight hundred BCE until the arrival of Spanish missionaries, the Ohlone people of the East Bay built and maintained a massive ceremonial and burial mound at the edge of the Bay's mudflats. At its peak the Emeryville Shellmound stood sixty feet high and three hundred fifty feet in diameter, the largest of more than four hundred twenty-five such mounds that once ringed San Francisco Bay. It was built layer by layer over generations: shells, ash, earth, and the carefully interred remains of the dead. Archaeologists excavating in nineteen twenty-four recorded over seven hundred burials at this site alone.

The mound's destruction came in stages, each one revealing something about who controlled the land and who did not. In the eighteen seventies, entrepreneurs sheared off the crown to build a dance hall. By the eighteen eighties, the full footprint had become Shellmound Park, a commercial amusement destination where visitors picnicked and rode carousels directly atop what were, in any meaningful sense, graves. When Prohibition collapsed the amusement park's liquor-dependent business model, industrial firms moved in, steel mills, paint factories, canneries, insecticide plants, occupying the site for roughly seventy years and saturating the soil with contamination.

In the early two thousands, a developer proposed and built the Bay Street Mall on the site. Construction crews encountered human bones. Most were quietly reburied at an undisclosed location within the original footprint. The Ohlone Shellmound memorial that stands today near the mall entrance is small and easy to overlook. It marks a place where five and a half millennia of continuous human presence was paved over in less than a century, and where ancestors whose descendants are still living were displaced to accommodate a parking structure.