This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Shell Mounds in San Francisco Bay Area
Authors: Allen Roberts and Matthew Booker
During the first years of the twentieth century, University of California archaeologist N.C. Nelson mapped shellmounds still present around the shores of San Francisco Bay. Nelson published his map in 1909, showing over four hundred shellmounds ranging in size from a few meters in diameter to tens of meters in diameter. An act of desperation in the face of rapid change, Nelson's map was hastily made and lacks precision. It is however a stunning reminder of the inhabitedness of San Francisco Bay: Thousands of years of native peoples living in and changing San Francisco Bay.
