Emeryville ShellmoundCalifornia Indigenous Mythology

The Emeryville Shellmound was not a trash heap. It was a cathedral.

For roughly 5,700 years — from approximately 3700 BCE to the arrival of Spanish missionaries — the Ohlone people of the East Bay built, maintained, and buried their dead in a massive mound at the edge of San Francisco Bay. It was constructed deliberately, layer by layer, from shell, earth, and ash, growing to roughly 60 feet tall and 350 feet in diameter. Over 700 human burials have been documented within it.

The Ohlone understanding of the shellmound was inseparable from their cosmology. The dead were placed within the mound facing specific directions. Burial goods — obsidian tools, shell beads, bone implements — accompanied them. The mound was a place where the living and the dead coexisted in the same physical structure, the dead literally beneath the feet of the living, part of the foundation.

Shellmounds were not unique to Emeryville — over 425 shellmounds once ringed San Francisco Bay. The Emeryville mound was the largest. It was the center of an Ohlone world.

The site of the Emeryville Shellmound is now occupied by the Bay Street shopping mall, a complex of retail stores and restaurants at the intersection of Shellmound Street and Powell Street in Emeryville, directly off Interstate 80.

The street name is the only surface-level acknowledgment. A small, controversial memorial plaque was installed in 1999. No significant portion of the mound survives above ground. The Bay Street development was built over the objections of Ohlone descendants and archaeologists.

The juxtaposition is visceral: a Gap store and a movie theater sit on top of 5,700 years of continuous human habitation and over 700 known burials.

The mound was first excavated by UC Berkeley archaeologist Max Uhle in 1902. His work established the site's extraordinary age and significance. Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History conducted further excavations in 1906.

Despite its archaeological significance, the mound was systematically demolished beginning in the 1920s for industrial development. A paint factory, a railroad right-of-way, and eventually the Bay Street mall were built on the site. Human remains were disturbed repeatedly during construction.

The Ohlone Indian Tribe has fought for decades to protect remaining shellmound sites around the Bay. The West Berkeley Shellmound (also ~5,000 years old) faced a similar threat from development and has been the subject of sustained legal and political battles. In 2020, the city of Berkeley voted to protect the West Berkeley site.

California's NAGPRA-equivalent legislation (CalNAGPRA) provides some protection for Native American burial sites, but enforcement has been inconsistent. For the Ohlone, the shellmounds are not archaeological curiosities — they are the graves of their direct ancestors, and many are under parking lots.