Bay Area cities have failed to protect archeological sites that once contained stone relics, bones, and other artifacts left by the area’s earliest inhabitants. Little now remains of the more than 400 shellmounds that once circled the Bay. Before the time of Jesus, before Solomon built his temple, before Stonehenge was erected or Cheops built his pyramid, a small community of Native Americans lived in marshlands near where Strawberry Creek met the Bay. Shellfish—mussels, clams, oysters, barnacles, abalone, and others—were their food staple. With passing centuries discarded shells and ash from burning wood formed a huge mound.

Radiocarbon dating suggests that native people settled here about 3700 BCE and inhabited the area of Berkeley’s shellmound for 4500 years. Around 800 CE they mysteriously disappeared. It is speculated that the Ohlone Indians, who the Spaniards encountered in this area at the end of the 18th century, were descendants of people who had lived here peaceably for millennia.

The above-ground portion of the Berkeley mound was removed, shovel by shovel, between 1853 and 1910 and sold as fertilizer, chicken feed, and grading material for roads. Portions of the mound may have been scattered in your backyard or beneath the street where you live. The area was eventually paved as a parking lot for Spenger’s Fish Grotto restaurant. As prospective developers began eyeing it as a place to build apartments and businesses, the City granted Landmark status to a a three-block site bounded by University and Hearst avenues, I-880 and Fourth Street. After years of campaigning to prevent development and lawsuits that went all the way to the California Supreme Court, the Ohlone group Sogorea Te’ raised $25 million to purchase the parking lot site and return it to ownership by Indigenous people.