shell mound

The 2.2-acre parking lot is the only undeveloped portion of the West Berkeley shell mound, a three-block area Berkeley designated as a landmark in 2000.

Before Spanish colonizers arrived in the region, that area held a village and a massive shell mound with a height of 20 feet and the length and width of a football field that was a ceremonial and burial site.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Anglo settlers took over the land and razed the shell mound to line roadbeds in Berkeley with shells.

The trust plans to build a commemorative park with a new shell mound and a cultural center to house some of the pottery, jewelry, baskets and other artifacts found over the years and that are in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

When human remains were found buried among the shells, the Berkeley Daily Gazette, in 1942, informed its readers that “a shell mound was the combination burial ground and garbage dump of California’s first settlers,” implying something at worst barbaric or at best careless in this funerary practice.