Nearly four decades after Knut R. Fladmark’s British Columbia Prehistory (1986) gave the public its first accessible narrative of the province’s deep past, Robert J. Muckle offers a worthy successor. Once upon This Land is not a revision and update of Fladmark so much as a reimagining for a discipline that has changed dramatically in the interim. The book interprets and distills British Columbia archaeology at a pivotal moment.
Where the older synthesis told a story largely about First Nations, Muckle’s is organized around the principle that authority over that story belongs to First Nations themselves. The point is set in a foreword by Indigenous archaeologist Karen Rose Thomas, who situates present-day British Columbia archaeology within the (1) United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and (2) Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action 43. This front matter establishes the book’s terms and moment in archaeological practice: Indigenous authority and stewardship of heritage, the unsettling of colonial vocabularies, and the parity of oral history and excavated evidence—so much so that one hopes the next book of this kind will be written by Indigenous archaeologists or coauthored with community partners. The chapters of Once upon This Land, however, consistently honor these values and priorities in meaningful ways.
Muckle’s organizing conceit is that archaeology is, above all, storytelling—tangible things interpreted through a storyteller’s perspective. He frames this around four themes: change, diversity, sustainability, and resilience. The deep-time chapters move briskly. Muckle narrates the coastal peopling of the Americas through its most evocative evidence, including the 13,000-year-old footprints on Calvert Island, the antiquity of Tse’k’wa (Charlie Lake Cave) in the ice-free northeast, and the early dog remains and cave sites of Haida Gwaii. He then moves quickly to the pithouse villages of the mid-Fraser (Keatley Creek, Bridge River), the Transformer site of X̲á:ytem, and the extraordinary Sechelt burials, where a single elite individual was interred with roughly 350,000 ground stone beads. Throughout, oral history and archaeology are presented as mutually corroborating rather than rivalrous: for example, Heiltsuk narratives and the Triquet Island dates, and the DNA linking Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį to living descendants. It is a succinct, accurate picture of the province’s deep history and of meaningful collaborations with the living descendants of the archaeological record.
But it is in the recent and contemporary chapters that the book most clearly distinguishes itself from its predecessor, and where Muckle’s own hand is most visible. He gives full weight to the archaeology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the Nikkei logging settlement at McKenzie Creek (Muckle’s own long-running Seymour Valley project: an “oasis of Japanese culture in the forest” abandoned at the moment of wartime internment). The final chapter takes the discipline into climate-driven wildfire and ice-patch archaeology, forensic and disaster work, the archaeology of our own trash, and a speculative coda imagining how future archaeologists might read early twenty-first-century British Columbia. Endearingly, Muckle closes with an affectionate autoethnography of archaeologists: our impassioned opinions about trowels, beer, and rain gear, and our eyes constantly scanning the ground for projectile points and bear tracks.
The brevity that makes the book so accessible is also its principal constraint. Topics that specialists know are contested (e.g., the politics of repatriation) often receive only a single deft paragraph, even though more could be said. The scholarly apparatus is a thematic “Further Reading” rather than full citations, which suits the intended audience but limits traceability for scholarly readers. Also, the speculative chapter, for all its appeal, is more essayistic than the rest of the book. But these are minor nitpickings about a book that will ignite conversations in the classroom and impart to readers new to British Columbia archaeology a deeper appreciation of the subject’s plurality, complexity, and depth in the province.
Once upon This Land is pitched with real skill to a wide readership—from the simply curious to beginning university students. Teachers will find it adoptable, and the site spotlights and “how archaeology works” sidebars are tailor made for a first course. Its deeper achievement, though, is to model a discipline reorganizing itself around Indigenous authority. If Fladmark’s volume recruited a generation into British Columbia archaeology, Muckle’s deserves to do the same, on terms its First Nations partners helped set. It is a warm, capacious, and quietly radical little book, and a pleasure to read and recommend.
