One thing geologists have to do, in any city in the world, is to erase the human changes imposed on the ground so they can see the landscape beneath. Whenever I do that in Oakland, mentally removing the accumulation of 150 years of buildings and development since Horace Carpentier (boo! hiss!) came across the Bay and staked out his downtown grid, I envision a wide grassland and wildflower-covered hills, punctuated by thick stands of oaks near the Bay and a striking redwood grove around Redwood Peak: the Ohlone world.
The Ohlones didn’t do a lot of building or digging on their land, just a little bit here and there, like the ocher quarry up by Holy Names University. They may have scooped out swimming holes in the creeks near their sweathouses. They left grinding holes, from centuries of pounding acorns into meal, where the rock was good. But they did make one kind of big thing, they and their ancestors — shellmounds. Geologists, be warned: one of these might fool you.
Shellmound near Mill Valley, 1909 (source)
The name is undignified, but the shellmounds can be thought of as the local version of the tells in the Middle Eastern countries, the remains of successive mud-brick villages that dot the ancient floodplains of the Fertile Crescent. The shellmounds may have begun as refuse heaps at seasonal campsites where abundant seafood and other resources supported generations of feasts, but the larger ones came to serve as burying grounds and ceremonial sites of regional importance. They became sacred. There were thousands of shellmounds around the Bay. Oakland had some too.
When agents of the Spanish empire came, removing the Ohlones and taking the land, the shellmounds were no longer living destinations. Later, American settlers saw them as a raw resource and started to dig them up in the 1850s. The mounds had good soil. The shells were mined and burned for lime, or crushed for roadbeds. The bones were dumped; artifacts were taken for souvenirs by generations of kids and passers-by, to be lost or broken. Museums hoarded some collections. The subject is a bitter one for the Ohlones and other Indigenous peoples, who still live among us and deserve better.
Wood and Munro-Fraser’s history of Alameda County, published in 1883, noted: “At some remote period there had been Indian camps upon the northern bank of the San Antonio Creek, and the mounds, composed mainly of oyster-shells, are not yet entirely obliterated.” San Antonio Creek was the brackish inlet where the Oakland harbor is today; see it on the inset of the 1869 Sessions map.
On the point at the east end of the creek, a shellmound is shown on the main map. Halley’s history of Alameda County, published in 1876, made note of its presence in the 1850s: “Shell Mound, the residence of Captain E. F. Rodgers, at the head of the estuary, became noted as a nursery and for the excellence of its fruit orchard.”
It became a military site during the Civil War years (which may be when this place took on the name “Union Point”), but the mound survived to be recorded in 1889 when the land was being subdivided as the Shell Mound Tract, at the intersection of Livingston and Water Streets.
When Nels Nelson, a UC Berkeley archeologist, published his survey of the Bay area’s shellmounds in 1909, he noted several in Oakland.
The map isn’t entirely reliable at the scale of publication (or the scan preserved online), but he located the cluster of big ones at the mouth of Temescal Creek, known collectively as the Emeryville Shellmound. He noted three more that had once existed in the Elmhurst area and another at the mouth of Brooklyn Creek, directly beneath the O in “Oakland.” Perhaps that last one was really the Union Point shellmound.
Remarkably, that location, 1901 Livingston Street, is a city-owned parcel, a triangular gravel lot by railroad tracks that’s now leased to a construction firm.
Perhaps the Ohlones would take it back. They could make it a nice adjunct to Union Point Park, the Embarcadero Cove Marina collection of historic buildings, and the art workshops in this modest district.
Oakland Geology 