How Hazelnuts Reveal Secrets from an Ancient BC City

For thousands of years, the ancient city of Temlaxam has lived in the adaawx, or oral histories, of First Nations in northwestern B.C.

Temlaxam, which extended more than 80 kilometres downstream from the confluence of the Skeena and Bulkley rivers, is said to have been so extensive that “the birds, exhausted, fall to the ground before they are able to traverse the whole city,” according to the adaawx. The name of the walled city, which featured networks of streets and longhouses, translates to “where life is good.”

But Temlaxam was to become a cautionary tale. Its occupants’ mistreatment of the natural environment was blamed for geological and other disasters, including a catastrophic landslide some 3,500 years ago. The residents dispersed, some becoming the Gitanyow, Gitxsan, Nisga’a and Ts’msyen, also known as Tsimshian — First Nations that still share similar languages today.

Beyond the adaawx and some archeological evidence, little is known about the lost city.

Now, a recently published paper, “Genetic Differentiation and Precolonial Indigenous Cultivation of Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta, Betulaceae) in Western North America,” is shedding new light on Temlaxam and the people who lived there, indicating that they transported, planted and cultivated beaked hazelnuts, which still thrive in the area.

“Just how unique and distinct, and isolated, the Temlaxam hazels are is incredible,” said Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an ethnoecologist and archeologist with Simon Fraser University’s Indigenous studies program, who led the study. “Plants growing where they shouldn't be is always a good flag for us historical ecologists.”

The research could have big implications for Indigenous land claims, Armstrong added, by challenging existing narratives that First Nations lived passively on the landscape rather than actively tending it.

Armstrong started collecting hazelnut leaf tissue samples from around the province a decade ago. Her findings were “so confounding” that it led her to dig deeper by examining linguistics and archeology associated with the food staple, she said.

Her research reveals that the region’s early inhabitants moved hazelnuts long distances and managed the shrubby plants, creating and maintaining “large-scale ecosystems and sometimes entire watersheds through prescribed burning and forest clearing, transplanting [and] rock wall constructions” to foster perennial plant species.

The study examined three regions. On the south coast, it found just one genetic cluster of hazelnuts. In the Interior, there were two.

But most intriguing was the complexity in northwest B.C., where five distinct genetic hazelnut clusters are scattered around the area surrounding Temlaxam — a region that today includes the community of Hazelton.

Armstrong said the findings were the “opposite of what you'd expect” from plants in an isolated grouping, which would normally lack genetic diversity.

“The pattern here with increased genetic diversity... that's huge unto itself,” she said. “When you drill down and you start to look at the ethnographic record, the archeological record, things start to come together in this really neat way.”

The same study that unearthed the 3,500-year-old landslide at Seeley Lake, about 10 kilometres west of Hazelton, also found that hazelnut pollen abruptly appeared at the location about 7,000 years ago.

Birds and squirrels were an unlikely means of transportation, the study found, as the hazelnuts had travelled vast distances. Because the shrubs are not self-pollinating, they would require multiple plantings in the same location to produce fruit.

The hazelnuts also overlap with ancient village sites, which form islands of distinct hazelnut groupings in the northwest.

The Kispiox Valley and Hazelton area had its own unique hazelnut, which continued a distance down the Skeena River before disappearing.

The next cluster appeared at Kitselas Canyon, a national historic site east of Terrace with a vast archeological record. To the west of Terrace, at the ancient Kitsumkalum village of Dałk Gyilakyaw, a distinct population exists that is not related to any other hazelnuts.

“It is exclusively associated with a village site,” Armstrong said. “Then, when you go up to the Nass, same thing — there’s nothing until you’re at Gitwinksihlkw.”

Hazelnuts travelled long distances

Hazelnuts from three large village sites — Gitwinksihlkw and Gitlaxt’aamiks in the Nass Valley and Kitselas Canyon east of Terrace — are all closely related to those in the Shuswap, roughly 700 kilometres to the southeast.

A linguistic review indicates it wasn’t only the hazelnuts that travelled those distances. The term for hazelnut also moved with them. The Gitxsan (sgan-ts’ek’ or sgan-ts’ak’) and Nisga’a (ts’ak’a or ts’inhlik) bear similarities with the Proto-Salish word for hazelnut, s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik.

Jacob Beaton, the executive director of the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Association and a member of the Ts’msyen Nation, grew up in the Hazelton area, surrounded by the proliferating nuts.

“I remember my mom, who's First Nations, telling me when I was a kid, if I could pick a whole bucket of hazelnuts, that she'd make homemade Nutella,” he said. “Those stories exist everywhere here in the First Nations communities of picking and harvesting hazelnuts.”

While Beaton always knew about the nuts’ existence, he never understood why they were so populous in the area. But he always wondered. He said there was “massive resistance” in the scientific community to the idea that they were brought there by Indigenous Peoples.

Beaton, who wasn’t directly involved in Armstrong’s research, said he had previously seen research indicating that First Nations had tended forest gardens in the area for at least 800 years. He said he was “very, very surprised” by Armstrong’s findings because they date back thousands, instead of hundreds, of years.

“To have this hazelnut study come out and learn that it's around 7,000 years that the First Nations brought hazelnuts and planted them here was insane,” he said, noting that it meant First Nations were growing food “before ancient Egyptians were planting their wheat fields.”

“When First Nations people say we've been here since time immemorial, that's exactly what they mean,” Beaton said.

What was truly jaw-dropping, Beaton said, was how the genetic mapping radiated from ancient Temlaxam, underscoring its role as a prehistoric travel hub and thriving cultural centre.

“To have it supported through this genetic evidence is really freaking cool,” he said. “You have the radiation of these plant species genetically that points to the single central location roughly where the oral histories have placed Temlaxam.”

The findings add further nuance to our understandings of ancient food systems, which in western frameworks have largely defined civilizations as either “farmer” or “forager.”

That’s been changing over recent decades, Armstrong said, replaced by the recognition that cultivating food can take a variety of forms.

Hazelnuts and Aboriginal title

The 2014 Supreme Court of Canada decision that granted title to the Tŝilhqot’in Nation found that Aboriginal title flows from “regular and exclusive use of land.”

Proving Aboriginal title means demonstrating First Nations’ territories were “regularly used for hunting, fishing or otherwise exploiting resources,” according to the decision.

Armstrong’s recent findings open opportunities to better understand the complex nature of traditional land use.

“We don't know anything about cultivation in the northwest because we never looked for it,” she said. “We said, ‘There's no agriculture,’ and we moved on.”

The oversight was likely caused by the fact that Indigenous cultivation “doesn't look like European legume and cereal agriculture,” Armstrong added. “Consciously or subconsciously, that gets into mainstream society as erasure of people from the land.”

When Armstrong shared her research results with a Gitxsan Elder, he was excited.

And then he urged her to continue. “He was like, ‘OK, great. Now do rice root,’” Armstrong said, laughing.

Beaton echoed that sentiment, pointing to additional species in the region that likely have their own uncovered origin stories — saskatoon berries, juniper, strawberries and raspberries.

“Hazelnuts are just one of many,” he said. “I'm now going, ‘OK, guys, time to go look at these other ones.’ They're super fascinating and essentially prove First Nations, Indigenous, horticulture and management of ecosystems from a very, very long time ago until recently.”