Fieldwork Futures: Historic Preservation

Abstract

In 2000, the City of Berkeley, California designated a parking lot adjacent to a kitschy local seafood restaurant just off Interstates 80 and 580 a local landmark (Figure 1). The now parking lot was the site of an Ohlone shell mound, middens of shellfish shells and bones also used as burial sites. Destroyed in stages between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, the shell mound was one of two major mounds associated with a settlement in Huichin, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chochenyospeaking Ohlone people on the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay, which they occupied for thousands of years. The landmarking of the West Berkeley Shell Mound was spurred by a proposal to construct a largescale mixeduse project on the site with commercial spaces and market and affordable housing units. The parking lot parcel was singled out by the Confederated Villages of Lisjan (Ohlone) as the last remaining piece of open space in the vicinity of their ancestral village, and although a site of erasure, one of extreme importance. Tribal leaders wished to see the land used as a site of recognition, observance, and spiritual use, presenting a visible sign for their members and the public of their long tenure in what we now call Berkeley. After a series of lawsuits and appeals, the Lisjan Ohlone and their allies lost their fight to prevent development on the site in the summer of 2021.1 Across the country and more than a dozen years later in Richmond, Virginia, another preservation ELAINE B. STILES