# The Seven Wonders of the Ancient Pacific Northwest

**Channel:** Cascalore
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvGkxqEGpq4
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/rvGkxqEGpq4

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Introducing Ancient Wonders of Northwest
- 2:31 — Petroglyphs and Weaving Traditions
- 8:16 — River Villages Lost to Dams
- 15:24 — Keatley Creek and Hidden Cities
- 19:50 — Why Lost History Still Matters

## Transcript

**[0:00]:** So around 2100 years ago, a guy named Antiper of Siden was traveling around the Middle East and was understandably really impressed with some of the things that he saw that people had built around there. He wrote about seven of those things in a poem and thus the idea of the seven wonders of the ancient world was born. Over the years, people started seeing other things that really impressed them. Sometimes these things were different variations of those original seven, but others were not in the Middle East. Or maybe the things were not ancient, or maybe they were things that hadn't been built by people. Sometimes people have even been impressed by more than seven things. All this is to say there is a long and venerable history of people declaring new wonders of the world. Well, today I'd like to add my own contribution to this tradition by looking specifically at a region that was one of the last to enter the written historical record and thus doesn't have quite as much clout in the

**[0:47]:** minds of enthusiasts of antiquity as somewhere like the Middle East or the Mediterranean and also my home region, the Pacific Northwest. And maybe in so doing, we can learn something about life in the ancient Northwest and what remnants we might still be able to see from those times today. Now, obviously, just because written history didn't come to the Pacific Northwest until the last couple hundred years doesn't mean that there was nothing interesting happening here before that. And archaeology working in tandem with local oral histories has given us a rich understanding of life before transocianic contact. To compile my list, I have narrowed it down using a few criteria. One, a wonder must be either man-made or modified by humans. It can't just be a purely natural wonder, so no dry falls or Mount Reineer. Two, it can't be just of interest because it was uniquely wellpreserved archaeologically, so no Ozette village.

**[1:34]:** These have to have been something that would have stood out in their prime. Three, the wonders have to be ancient. I'm allowing myself some wiggle room here since it's not like antiquity has hard and fast dates in the Americas, but things only known to have been around since the 18th or 19th century aren't getting counted. Four, the wonders don't have to be architectural or even physical. Works of art, UNESCO style, and tangible heritage and even social customs are all fair game. However, individual people are off limits. So, no kenowick man. And five, in keeping with the spirit of the original seven wonders of the ancient world, these have to have been something that would have been immediately noticeable as interesting and amazing to a traveler at the time. So, not just something of purely academic or legal interest in modern times. So, no Marmma's Rock Shelter and again, no Kenowick man.

**[2:16]:** So, without further ado, let's get to the list. These aren't ordered in any quantitative way, but I've tried to order them generally, starting from least underappreciated at number seven to most underappreciated at number one.

**[2:31]:** Starting off, we have the Bellakula Valley, located in the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's western coast. Except for the small town of Bellakula and a few outlying communities, the valley is largely undeveloped and showcases some of the most beautiful and extensive examples of rock carvings you'll find in any temperate rainforest. The local New Hel community, who have lived in the area as far back as recorded history goes, are understandably hesitant to open up the petetroglyphs for widespread viewing. So, they can only be accessed via a few local guides from the community. According to these guides, the carvings are estimated to be around 4,000 to 5,000 years old and possibly even older. and if so they have weathered the elements of the rainforest remarkably well over that time. The petetroglyphs show both scenes and characters of New Hulk mythology as well as the animals of the region.

**[3:15]:** Petroglyphs aren't unique to Bellakula and indeed I have one other set of petetroglyphs in my list. But whereas others are often found in deserts, rocky environments, seashores, and other open areas, the deep forests of Bellakula give these a magic all their own.

**[3:33]:** Next, we have the entry that will probably be the biggest stretch for most people as far as being compared to ancient monuments. So, bear with me. Take a look around at anything that you have that's a woven textile, old or new, handmade or machine made. Could be a t-shirt, a blanket, sweater, rug, anything. Look at it very closely. And at the most basic level, you will see something like a grid or maybe like a screen of pixels on a computer. Any curves are either printed on or eventually break down into individual woven notches. From this, you might reasonably conclude that having a woven perfect circle with no steps, notches, or straight lines along its edges might be impossible. Well, I'm here to tell you that it isn't. Now, I'm not an expert in textiles, but what I can tell you is that along the northwest coast of British Columbia and over onto Haidaguay and up into Alaska, they have developed a system of weaving that allows for

**[4:23]:** curved designs to be woven directly into the textile, a process that was clearly indigenously developed and not just copied from some other weaving style elsewhere. We don't know when or where exactly the style was originally invented, thanks in large part to how rare it is for textiles to stay intact, especially in wet climates. but it was already being used by the time Russian explorers visited the area in the late 18th century. We also know a bit about how this technique has developed over time and who some of the key players were. The raven's tail weaving style originally developed among the Simshen people using mountain goat fur. Raven's tail, while still elaborate, is still more in line with what we might be used to seeing in woven patterns, squares, sharp corners, lights and darks with only a little bit of color here and there. Still, the process is complex and it can take an expert as much as 6 months to weave an apron in the Ravens Tale style.

**[5:13]:** Over time, the style was modified and refined until it became what is now known as chillcat weaving. Possibly developed by a Simshian woman around the 18th century. So, yes, I'm aware this style specifically might not count as ancient, although its forerunners could be, or possibly the Niska A people. Chilcatw weaving was the first weaving technique developed by any culture anywhere in the world capable of producing a circular arc within the weave itself. Also around this time, weavers began to use a bigger variety of colors, especially yellows, blues, and blacks. This style allowed elites to show off their prestige visually for anyone to see, especially considering each robe could take up to a full year to produce. By the 1990s, only six people still knew the secrets of chilcat weaving. However, they were fortunately able to pass on their knowledge to a new generation. And today, you can find examples in museums across the continent, with one modern blanket having sold at Christies for $62,500 in 2019, the equivalent of about $88,000 in 2025.

**[6:17]:** So, about 17 million years ago, a series of massive eruptions began in what is now eastern Washington. By the time these eruptions stopped around 11 million years after they began, over 63,000 square miles of the region was covered with basaltt deposits. As the ice age glaciers melted in water from Montana's glacial lake Missoula flooded the landscape, erosion exposed massive pillars of volcanic rock that have become icons of the Colombia River and the surrounding plateau. One group living along the banks of the Colombia River or Chijana as they called it was the Wanapum. The center of Wanapum spirituality was the river island Chawwash Chilnney dubbed Whale Island by settlers. Starting around 11,000 years ago, the Wanapam community decorated the surrounding basalt cliffs with scenes and figures representing their religious beliefs and practices. Around 300 such pieces of rock art were known at one time. Seeing these peering down at you from the cliff faces the river carried you downstream, I imagine it must have felt something like going into an open air cathedral for an outsider with the columns of rock along the Columbia

**[7:21]:** Gorge opening up to the heavens above. In 1961, the Priest Rapids Dam completed construction down river followed by the aptly named Wanapum Dam 2 years later, flooding essentially the entire Wanapum community and completely submerging Chawwash Chilnney. The Wanapam tribal members today number about 60 and mostly live in the area of the Priest Rapids Dam. So what happened to their art? Out of the known petroglyphs, around 20% of them were removed and relocated ahead of time, sparing them the flooding, but no longer able to be seen in full glory or in full context. These 60 remaining petetroglyphs today are on display at the Genko Petrified State Forest near Vantage, Washington. And I've got to say, even looking at them now, you can still feel a strange sort of energy coming from them. Some looking very familiar while others clearly showing something a bit more spiritual that I find it hard to wrap my modern mind around.

**[8:16]:** Follow the Burke channel about 100 km southwest of Bellacula and tucked away in the deep coastal forest you might see what remains of the small Hiltzuk Nation town of Neimu, British Columbia. Most recently, Nimu was a canery town which processed fish between 1893 and 1988, with the site being sold in 1991 and largely abandoned since. But Nimu was here long, long before the canery started in 1893. Archaeologists believe this site was home to a fishing village going back to at least 4,000 B.CE and inhabited at least part-time all the way back in the 9th millennium B.CE. Right around the end of the last ice age. At that time, the area around Nimu would have been well inland with the location of the current town perched on a high hill thanks to the much lower sea levels. It's entirely possible that there are even more remains of these early time periods buried in the waters around the town just waiting to be discovered.

**[9:10]:** This 11,000year chain of peoples in and around the site makes it one of the oldest inhabited loces anywhere in Canada. An analysis by Aubrey Cannon and Donga Wi Yang of the DNA found in salmon remains at the time may push back the date of the initial permanent human presence at Nimub to 5,000 B.CE, which would make this one community older than the entire Indo-Uropean language family and thousands of years older than the pyramids of Giza. If someone had been intrepid enough, or maybe foolhardy enough to sail up the coast from early Nimu to the Bearing Sea, they might have been able to catch a glimpse of the last woolly mammoth populations in North America before they died out. Put in other terms, Nimu lasted as a community for roughly as long as both China and ancient Egypt's entire histories combined. Now, that's not to say that this was a culture on the same scale as all of China or ancient Egypt as a whole.

**[10:05]:** Not by a long shot. But an area with as harsh a climate as Canada's western coast that long ago, being able to sustain a population that did not use agriculture or any kind of metallergy so consistently for close to 7,000 years, that's pretty special. And I have to bet that anyone nearby who came across Nimu or whatever it was known as back in those days must have been very happy to see this place tucked between the glaciers and the rising seas, knowing they could get some refuge from the weather and a nice salmon meal there.

**[10:38]:** Kihin or Kishan, located on the west coast of Vancouver Island across Barkley Sound from Ukulett, was the historic capital of the Huayat First Nations up until the 1880s. The community was founded around 1,000 B.CE at a naturally defensible location at the mouth of the sound. Given its strategic location and abundant resources in the area, Kihin was not without conflict. Since recordkeeping began in the area, Kihen traded hands between the Hu Aayat and the Clum people at least twice before being abandoned. While the remains in the area today mostly date from the later years of the village, it had a long history as one of the few pre-Uropean locations in the Pacific Northwest that could have reasonably been labeled as a fortress for its myriad of defenses, both natural and man-made. And indeed, when the area was established as a national historic site in 1999, it was under the name Kiin Village and Fortress.

**[11:30]:** While popular culture often imagines pre-European warfare in the Americas to be skirmishes between nomadic groups encountering each other in large open fields, what Kheen shows us is that there were likely some local parallels to sieges or even urban warfare in the Pacific Northwest, albeit on a much smaller scale than what would have been seen in more densely populated areas in other parts of the world. Due to the abundance of lumber and the ease with which it could be worked, many settled cities in the ancient Northwest have been completely lost to time since woods just doesn't preserve as well as stone. I recommend checking out this recent video from Stefan Milo on some of the great wooden discoveries of archaeology in which he notes that if wood could survive better across thousands of years, we probably wouldn't even call it the stone age, but rather the wood age.

**[12:14]:** Since archaeology is bound to have a certain survivorship bias that shapes how he viewed the past by things that were best preserved, it's great to imagine how a town like Kieen might have looked in its prime. Long houses lined up above the beach, berms of earth, wood, and rock on three sides, canoes packing the shore. No wonder it was the envy of the surrounding nations.

**[12:41]:** This is probably one of the more depressing entries on this list as far as how long it survived and thrived before the modern world came a calling. Starting 11,000 and possibly as much as 15,000 years ago, the community of Salilo or WM as it is known to Nino was a major hub and crossroads for fishing and trade earning it the nickname the Wall Street of the West. Located just upstream from the Dallas, Oregon at a falls on the Columbia River. It was possibly the single oldest continually inhabited community anywhere in the Americas. And the goods traded there, including horses, robes, tobacco, beads, jewelry, and really anything that someone might want to trade came from as far away as the Great Plains, Alaska, and the Southwest. But in keeping with the spirit of the list, this site can't just be of academic interest. It has to have been impressive to the eyes of a traveler at its peak.

**[13:29]:** And fortunately in this case we have just such an account from none other than the Louiswis and Clark expedition who traveled through twice in October 1805 and April 1806. William Clark wrote in his journal, "This is the great march of all this country and estimated at the time that the population was around 7,400 to 10,400 people along the Columbia Rivers rapids between Salilo and the Cascade Rapids where today the Bonavville Dam stands. According to Katrine Barber at Portland State University, pre-cont salilo may have had a year- round population of around 10,000, increasing to 13,000 depending on the season. If true, the community would nearly rival Cahokia as one of the largest pre-Colombian cities in the present United States. 5 years after Louiswis and Clark passed through, fur trapper Alexander Ross visited Salilo, which he estimated had a population of around 3,000, calling it the Great Emporium or March of the Colombia.

**[14:23]:** And thanks to the popularity of games of chance among the inhabitants and visitors to the falls, the general theater of gambling and rogary, Ross also had estimated that of the 3,000 people at the falls, only about 3 or 4% of them were from local tribes, with all of the others being traders from afar. Native communities continued to use Salilo Falls as a fishing area well into the 20th century. However, as the needs for reliable electricity grew, so too did efforts to harness the same power of the Colombia that had kept the fish coming through for the last 15,000 years. On March 10th, 1957, rising waters from the construction of the Dial Dam consumed Salilo, never to reemerge. The small Salilo village near the former site of the falls continues to this day. And while the main site is still flooded, sonar surveys indicate that the original topology remains intact under the waters of what is now Lake Salilo.

**[15:15]:** Maybe one day it will reemerge, but I doubt it will be anytime soon.

**[15:24]:** If you've made it this far and thought, "Well, that's all well and good, but all of the original ancient wonders of the world were physically big and impressive works of architecture." Yes, that's usually true. I hope that what the other six centuries have shown is that cultural expression doesn't necessarily have to take the form of monumental architecture to count as a wonder. But if you're still not happy, then Keatley Creek will hopefully satisfy your jonesing for some archaeological eye candy, even if little of the original structures have survived. And it comes with a bit of a mystery of its own. Keatley Creek is located along the Frasier River in southwest British Columbia on the traditional lands of the Statleam First Nation around 25 km upstream from Liilowit. Its location is intentionally not widely broadcasted and you won't see any tour groups visiting in order to avoid looting or damage.

**[16:10]:** But it is clearly visible on Google Earth and that's because this site is big. Comprised of about 115 former houses and buildings. All that remains of the Keatley Creek site today are these crater-like impressions in the Earth. The main site covers around 10 acres with satellite complexes up the hill and across the creek. Best estimates are that the site was first inhabited around the 5th millennium B.C.E., so about 7,000 years ago. But the settlement really took off around 400 B.CE and remained a major settled community for a good 1500 years before it was abandoned mysteriously sometime between the 11th and 13th century CE. More on that later. The houses here would have been pit houses where a circular hole is dug. Wooden walls are placed around the rim of the hole and an iconic roof is added on the top. This type of construction was common in the Pacific Northwest.

**[16:55]:** But what makes Keatley Creek notable is not just the number of houses in close proximity, but the size of these houses. The largest being up to 21 m in diameter, 69 ft. Do your p<unk> r squared and you're looking at houses with a floor area of around 350 m or 3,700 square ft, solidly into McMansion territory there. And that's assuming they only had one level. That would have been a staggering piece of construction to walk into in that era. And it was needed when the population was around 1,00 to,500 in total or averaging around 9 to 13 people per house. Simon Frasier University's Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology writes that one house, House Pit 7 specifically, had 45 or more people living in it at one time. 45. These mega houses were probably unsurprisingly multiple families living together, probably in some kind of hierarchical system with one house chief.

**[17:50]:** Along the same lines, Jesse Morin, writing for the Archaeological Society of British Columbia's Miden Journal, assessed that those two satellite areas of the site, the one across the creek and the one up the hill, have sets of artifacts that suggest that they may have been more secluded, secretive areas for either elite members of the community or those with special spiritual status. Keatley Creek wasn't just a place where people lived in close proximity, but a place with a social hierarchy and likely rules that governed its inhabitants. It was a city with everything that came along with being a city. And it existed and thrived as a city for centuries upon centuries, undergoing who knows how many changes and conflicts and resolutions that may have been forever lost to time. And speaking of lost to time, what happened to Keatley Creek? Why don't people live there now after such a long run?

**[18:37]:** Well, as I said, best estimates are that the site was abandoned around the 11th to the 13th century, well predating European exploration, settlement, or diseases in the area. What is known is that other nearby settlements were also depopulated around the same time. Some sort of climate related disaster, a local epidemic, or warfare have all been suggested as possibilities, although there is no conclusive evidence. What is known is that the inhabitants were almost certainly the ancestors of the modern Stutle Liam people. Their language is still spoken. Some of their same stories are probably still told. And even if Keatley Creek is abandoned, the community is still alive. Now, I didn't go to school in British Columbia, so I can't vouch for how well-known this site is there. But I will say it is unknown enough that I couldn't find a single artistic rendering of how it might have looked in the past.

**[19:23]:** And there are very few other YouTube videos that cover it. Although, this might just be in part due to how restricted the site is to public access. Fortunately, no doubt, thanks in large part to those conservation efforts, the site is extremely wellstudied and surveyed, possibly one of the most anywhere in Western Canada. Even so, I think it deserves a clear number one on this list for how little it is known to the public at large versus how well it is known archaeologically and just how unique of a site it is across the entire region.

**[19:50]:** So, what's the point of this list? Am I a covert member of the British Columbia tourist board or maybe trying to push some grand vision of my homeland's mythical past Chachescu style? Well, I think this video, a lot like a lot of other videos on this channel, is about lost history and lost culture. In this case, not lost in the sense of hidden, misplaced, destroyed, ruined, or stolen, but lost in the sense of apathy. See, when you grow up in the Pacific Northwest, even if you had really, really good teachers, like I certainly think I did, history is usually something that happens somewhere else. The ancient world is the world of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, China, maybe India. It's not until some fur trappers and Louiswis and Clark come along that history is actually about the places that we drive by every day. Historians and archaeologists know that the ancient world didn't just happen in a handful of places and everywhere was the ancient world at some point.

**[20:39]:** But sometimes we just consider that history too boring or not flashy enough to let it sit in the same part of our brains as the really cool stuff like World War II, Bronze Age collapse or the slap. And so we file it away and it becomes lost history. Voluntarily lost history. History that we put in the attic and forget about. Even if it's the story of our own homes, our own neighbors, the ground under our feet, the people who first came here and decided, "This is where I'm going to make my life." Places where people loved and fought and died and invented and did things they regretted but told their friends about anyway. We rightfully get mad at ISIS for destroying Palmyra or at museums that hold looted artifacts. We mourn when Notradam's spire collapses. We have subreddits dedicated to finding nostalgic pieces of lost media from our childhoods.

**[21:24]:** So, take a moment to appreciate that you probably have things in your backyard wherever you live or maybe a few hours drive away that have not been lost, that we do still have that have survived the trials of history. Sometimes, sure, they aren't what they used to be and they show their age. Sometimes they're under hundreds of feet of water. Maybe some of them have even yet to be made, but they're there and they have stories to tell if you take a second to listen to them. So, let me know in the comments. What are the seven ancient wonders where you live? And if you're also from the Pacific Northwest, what would you add or take off of my list? I want to take a moment to thank everyone for hitting 100 subscribers. I know I don't upload as often as some other YouTubers, so apologies for taking a while, and thanks for taking a chance on a relatively new channel.

**[22:09]:** I hope that the shorts that I put out have been able to bridge the gap a bit. I'm currently working on a video on early exploration of the Northwest Coast, so stay tuned for that. Stay safe out there, and thanks as always for watching.