While perhaps best known for having an excellent espresso machine within arm’s reach of his office recliner, UVIC’s own Dr. Brian Thom also runs the Anthropology Department’s Ethnographic Mapping Lab. One recent creation of this lab is a project to incorporate panoramic, scrollable photos and expository text of certain Coast Salish cultural landscapes into Google’s street view (Brian has been working on several cool projects with Google’s sponsorship and assistance.) This is a cool example of applied community-based research brought to the public eye in a sensitive manner.

The above is one of the more interesting ones in that it shows Hw’e’itun at Dionisio Point on Galiano Island, known for excavations by Don Mitchell and more recently by Colin Grier. The StreetView summary leads you out to some more information on this site:

This is an ancestral village site of the Penelakut Tribe and an ongoing place of cultural, ecological and social significance to Penelakut people. It is also a treasured and significant archaeological site, DgRv-3, which has been carefully researched through a collaborative partnership between Penelakut Tribe, archaeologists Washington State University, and BC Parks. Some of the results of this archaeological research are available here (http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/index.php?id=997) and a photo-based essay is here (http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/we.php?id=333).

Equally, the picture below goes to a summary of Leeyqsun, Shingle Point on Valdes Island: village site, huge clam garden, and so much more. The blurb takes you out to discussion of the research Brian and his group have been doing on the historic movements of the Lyackson away from Valdes (PDF). I’m not sure if there are plans to expand the current selection of Coast Salish cultural places but there is a lot of content there already if you follow out the links in many of the summaries. By the way, if you missed it, the venerable (in web years) Brian Thom’s Coast Salish Page is now hosted at UVIC and is an important source for references and downloads on the cultural and natural history of the Salish Sea.