The Ohlone Shellmound at Emeryville: Three Thousand Years for a Parking Lot

The ground you are near was, for three thousand years, a living community. The West Emeryville Shellmound was one of the largest Ohlone village and burial sites on San Francisco Bay, a mound built up over millennia from the shells of the clams and mussels that Chochenyo Ohlone people harvested from the Bay margin. It was also a cemetery. The California History journal, the Online Archive of California, and KQED San Francisco all document the site.

In nineteen oh two, the University of California excavated portions of the shellmound, and again in the nineteen twenties. The remains that were removed in that excavation, and what happened to them afterward, are part of a larger reckoning in California archaeology that continues today.

The rest of the mound was demolished incrementally over the following century. It became landfill for an amusement park. It became light industrial land. In nineteen ninety-nine, a developer broke ground on a shopping center on the remaining portion of the site, over the protests of the Ohlone community and despite awareness that the area contained burial remains.

The Ohlone community's response became an annual ceremony held at the site each fall, a gathering that has continued every year since the shopping center was built. The ceremony happens in the parking lot. The mound is gone. The people who built it over three thousand years are still here.

Shellmound Street in Emeryville marks the site of a related mound nearby. The street name is the only acknowledgment the street grid offers. Three thousand years of accumulated habitation, the oldest neighborhood in the Bay Area, left one street name and an annual ceremony in a parking lot. That is the accounting the Bay Area has so far managed.