During an excavation done prior to the construction of a new sidewalk in the park, I located the buried features of a house structure next to a concentration of shell midden at the northwest edge of the site. With help from volunteers from the Archaeological Society of BC, we uncovered multiple post-hole remains, suggesting that a house was rebuilt here several times. The depth of upper deposits would suggest that the midden dump was still being used to about the time of the house-post date. Oral history indicates that inhabitants of this site were killed off by disease. This could have been during the smallpox epidemic of 1782 or from the spread of earlier epidemics in Siberia in 1769 or Mexico in 1519.
Future work is needed to pin-point the time the site was abandoned.
The site is in a storm-exposed locality, yet the remains of food found here and the presence of human burial cairns on Beacon Hill behind the site suggest some degree of permanency in settlement. Animal bones recovered from the site do not clearly indicate whether people came here on a seasonal basis to procure specific foods. Remains included locally available fish such as ratfish and dogfish, sculpin, greenling and salmon, with only herring being suggestive of a springtime specialization, and local birds such as the grebe and marbled murrelet. Mammal bones included deer, elk, raccoon, domestic dog, seal and porpoise. Mollusc remains were almost all from species not available in the vicinity and must have been obtained from a few miles away.