From under the pavement,

Mainly composed of charcoal, ash, and shell, these mounds have often been termed kitchen middens, a term which comes from the Danish koekkenmoedding meaning kitchen refuse. At first I thought of a shellmound as a pile of ancient garbage, having no idea of the alchemy of this heap of refuse, nor of the importance it would have for me in exploding my earlier understandings of home.

While common in the protected lagoons and bays of California, shellmounds are found on both coasts of North America, and have been uncovered from Denmark to Australia and New Zealand. As I delve into the history of our West Berkeley mound, my sense of life in these times widens to sites around the world.

This shellmound underworld taps into my own darkness, into old fears and fascinations. It's the human burials most of all that draw me. In contrast to many other mounds worldwide, bay mounds include this extra dimension. Amidst the remains of shellfish, sea otter, and salmon, amidst awls, mortars, and fishhooks, archaeologists have uncovered whole cemeteries. In the 1950's excavation at the West Berkeley mound, almost one hundred skeletons were exhumed. To explore the world of the shellmound, I risk a blind descentÑinto a dim and unpredictable landscape in ancient history and in my own mind.

On the invitation of Stephanie, I have helped plan a conference on what I've come to think of as "our" shellmound as well as a nearby mound also threatened by commercial expansion. At the conference, I sit in the front row as Kent Lightfoot, archeologist at the University of California, introduces the mounds.

After the melting of the glaciers in the Pleistocene Epoch, the rising sea level created the bay. Four or five thousand years ago, the sea level rise began to flatten out, the bay to take a more stable form. Wherever freshwater streams entered the bay, great shellmounds developed, usually with smaller ones clustered around them. Most of the large mounds appear to have been abandoned although the reasons for this abandonment are not fully known; it was possibly in the wake of some drastic environmental change, perhaps a great drought.

On top of these mounds whose cores held many generations of ancestors, the native peoples made their villages.

They lived on top? Did I mishear what he said? A sense of shock and interest. People can't literally have lived over their garbage and their dead! But, indeed, evidence suggests that shellmounds were intentionally elevated mounded villages with storage pits, earth ovens, hearths on top of ancestral remains; this was where people made their home.

As I listen to this history, images of the landscape traverse the millennia. I picture the mounds, rising like islands over the bay, circles of tule huts safely above the tidal action as the sea level continues to rise. From these raised villages, silver salmon, steelhead, and seals are easily viewed in the bay below. And at night, fishermen crisscrossing the bay recall that Orion's Belt will return at midnight on the Winter Solstice as it has every year over many thousands of years. They look up at the glittering of the cooking fires, emblems of their precious home site. To preserve whatever is left of the shellmound before encroachment of a proposed parking garage and high end mall Stephanie and other shellmounders are working to get the mound approved as a City of Berkeley landmark. This involves a long process including approval by the Landmarks Commission, review of the completed Landmark Application at a public hearing and, if there are appeals contesting the landmark status, battles over appeals at the Berkeley City Council.

Designed to landmark buildings, the official application requires adherence to a strict form. Many local buildings in Ocean View have been landmarked. In its official application, the Church of Pilgrim's Rest lists the date of construction: 1878, and original use: worship. When Stephanie sends me the formal application for the shellmound, I am struck by the incongruity. It's impossible to straight jacket this mound to fit late 20th-century terms.
 

Meanwhile, talk of this mound circulates in the Ocean View neighborhood. On a walk with Cleo, I notice a mounted drilling rig parked in the center of Spenger's parking lot. A group of folks wearing floppy hats and leaning on shovels are standing around the drilling rig. This is an archaeological firm hired by the owners of the lot to do test drilling, checking for the remains of the mound. I watch the broad auger cut through the asphalt and plunge down, spinning into the dirt to reveal the stratigraphy - wet mud, wet sand, clay, silt, and pebbles. Cleo gives me a filmy-eyed look then takes a sniff as the team of what seem to be student archaeologists clean out the findings from the drill curves. Some use shovels and some their bare hands. I feel the pull to dig my own hands into this mud and sand, to feel down through thousands of years into this ancient home.

At the shellmound conference, Kent Lightfoot had talked about a way to sense what's below the surface of the ground without digging, removing what's found, or destroying it. Through what he termed "geophysical methods," one might study the worlds of native peoples while leaving them intact. What a beautiful idea, I had thought when I first heard it, to observe through the senses with acoustic reflection, thermal sensing, and ground-penetrating radar. It sounded to me like mindfulness - a way to look without interfering. I love these methods for honoring the history so in keeping with the way I would like to honor it. Without damaging the meaning of this ancient heritage, can I learn from it, allow it to permeate my own explorations of home?

Years before, when I'd asked Stephanie about her passion to preserve the neighborhood, I'd told her about my interest in the meaning of the word inhabit, with its Indo-European root ghabh, tracing back to "give," and in seeming paradox, to "receive."

Several days later, Stephanie had delivered a large manila envelope to my front door. Inside was a scholarly article on San Francisco Bay shellmounds by Ed Luby, a researcher and professor at U.C. Berkeley; he'd been a speaker at the Shellmound Conference. Clipped onto the article was a card with a neatly inscribed entry from the Old English Dictionary on the word "inhabit," followed by a note: Alas, no mention of give or receive. But check out Ed Luby's article. I think it's relevant to that give-and-receive idea you're getting at. (Reading this article has revolutionized my life!!!) Steph."

I give this article a serious read. For me too, it is riveting. As I study it I begin to sense a kind of alchemy - when food remains and burials are layered to create home. So many of my assumptions are turned upside down. First to be overturned is my sense of the composition of the mound - what seemed to be refuse. The shells, bones, teeth, beaks - the non-edible parts of what people ate - may not have been seen as garbage but as symbols of the species who provided the community with food, who offered them life. Not trash at all but sacred emblems.

 If the composition of the mound was sacred, daily life on this mound may have had a sacred cast. Here, on this sacred hill, mortuary festivities  - dance, music, and feasting - may have been regularly orchestrated by the community above their dead. Ceremonial relations with the sacred emblems of shell and bone may have allowed villagers ongoing communion, a kind of sacrament, with the species that fed them.

It's hard for me to see this seeming garbage dump in a new way - to overturn my habitual understandings. But when Luby calls up the image of the shaman, arrayed in bones, feathers, and teeth, I begin to get an inkling of his meaning. I recall from my youth watching dancers in the Pueblo Indian ceremonies and seeing photographs of shamans. I'd never given any thought to why a shaman might be outfitted in the feathers, fur, or antlers of the animals eaten by the community, why these totems might be seen as sacred. Now it makes intuitive sense. Somehow, this opens up the shellmound world for me. The whole shellmound, after all, was made out of that sacred stuff. Bones and shells imbued with this special significance created the matrix of the mound. I picture a kind of compost heap, at the same time practical and symbolic.

So, burying the dead in this sacred matrix may not have been indifferent disposal but rather, the burial of one part of the community in the matrix from which the community took its life. In feasting above the buried remains of the dead, the villagers perhaps saw themselves as "feeding" their ancestors. Luby put it this way: "The dead must be fed." In exchange for this ritual offering, villagers presumably asked for help from the ancestors - to sustain the species that offered them life. When I think this through, I see why Stephanie sent me Luby's article, why she linked this theory of the shellmound to giving-and-receiving. I begin to imagine the shellmound dwellers as they gathered together for their ceremonial exchanges, that sacred giving-and-receiving - among the living, the ancestors, and the species that offered life. Truly this is a beautiful understanding of what it means to inhabit a home.

On our corner, five neighbors are beginning to gather on Sunday evenings to meditate together in one of our homes. This gathering feels like something people have been doing here through the millennia. But it has taken a while to make it happen. When Michael and Zoe moved in next door, and I learned that Michael was a meditator, I was determined to find other meditators on the block. I found myself suggesting that we meet in Michael and Zoe's newly vacated basement.

On our first Sunday evening, we take off our shoes; we step down into the low-ceilinged basement, feel the cold concrete under our bare feet, breathe in a faint whiff of dank basement smell. This felt like just the right place to join in silence and attention - to open to the unknown. Ours is a ragged but satisfying circle whereas I'm imagining in shellmound days - home also means temple, means church.

Often I reflect on the shellmound, on its many layers of meaning. In conjuring up a vision of this corner where I live, I explode the conventional categories. Instead of separating out the house where we sleep and eat, the dump down the road, the cemetery across town, the church on the corner, I take a visionary leap and superimpose these domains. I call it home, and take refuge in that. In the following months I take on what I call "shellmound mind." This is an experiment in imagination. Can I risk that ancient experience of home where categories so separate in our current world converge?

For several weeks I make visits to a local cemetery to meditate on the graves of the settlers who lived on our corner in Victorian times.  I imagine this burial place, as in the days of the shellmound, as if it were under my residence. I try to see this ancestral burial ground as home.

The morning after one of my cemetery excursions, I head off towards the garbage transfer station to try a similar experiment. Can I acclimate myself to this "dumping ground," risk experiencing this too as home?

In a vast warehouse - with its three walls, open front and high roof - a  great mound of garbage heaves, collapses, and spreads. The air sickens with the fetid odor. Shoved around by little tractors, the mound oozes out wheels and broken machinery. All manner of mattresses, old chairs, and ironing boards mix in with decaying foods and kitty litter, paint thinner, and insecticide. Seagulls scuttle in and out, scavenging. Over this rank and gelatinous mountain, something which looks like steam rises.

I remember descriptions of garbage in the early days of the European settlement. Kitchen scraps were fed to the chickens and pigs, thrown in the nearest empty lot or creek bed. Most garbage was simply buried with the do-it-yourself approach. When the population got too dense, this do-it-yourself method was forbidden so householders hired a man with a wagon to dispose of their waste; they didn't concern themselves about where he hauled it. Early in the twentieth century, plans were made by the cities of Berkeley and Oakland to collect garbage and to send it out on barges to be dumped in the Pacific Ocean. With this goal, private companies with horse-drawn wagons ("honey wagons") were hired to collect the trash. To reduce the bulk, Berkeley decided to burn down the trash before sending it out to sea. So that's when the incinerator was built at the shoreline. But public protest flared up because the cost of the new incinerator was exorbitant and the honey wagons were rutting the pavement and dribbling their contents in the streets. The incinerator was subsequently closed down, and in the following year the Signal Steam Ship Company hauled the wettest and smelliest garbage out to sea.

When the garbage boat was wrecked, the incinerator was started up again only to be abandoned once more after a new wave of public protest over the cost and the smell. Then a fill-and-cover method was instituted. This began with five blocks of marshy land to the west of the shore and finally filled 175 acres of bay. And following that, Berkeley set up this transfer station. Whatever is not recycled here is now carted off to Altamont Pass outside Livermore to be buried.

Now, at the transfer station, I drive from spot to spot trying to escape incoming garbage trucks. Whenever I can, I park, lean my journal on the steering wheel and scribble down impressions. The little tractors zoom back and forth attacking the heaps of refuse, clapping their crablike pincers. Those crab-tractors are pulling out large metal objects from the mound and depositing them in other bins. First comes a bicycle, then a metal bath tub, a toaster oven, an old record player, then what looks like some kind of motor.

Just as I'm about to get out of the car, to take a closer look, a tractor speeds by followed by a city garbage truck which swings in and backs up to regurgitate its load into the heap. In front of the mound of garbage, a sign reads: "Children and pets must remain in vehicle."  The guys directing the traffic are all in protective gearÑbright orange vests, hard hats, goggles, nose and mouth masks. Better stay put.

So I settle in behind the wheel and try a few minutes of dump-meditation. The whirring and beeping of the trucks takes over my consciousness, that and the aroma of the garbage

I'm taken by a feeling I can't name, disgust maybe, or simply sadness, for all of this waste. I'm looking out at unwanted appliances, furniture, clothes, food stuffs, that people in this neighborhood - perhaps even our family - wanted, bought, gave each other as gifts, to which we once claimed ownership, and now are throwing out. Unwanted because it's too old, or not quite the right color, or beginning to decay. Somehow it failed to offer the satisfaction that it first seemed to promise.

In the gathering dusk one evening, I take a walk with Cleo. As summer bougainvillea and woodbine bloom, families harvest their tomatoes and zucchini, hang out in the street watering their front gardens. Here, in someone's yard, the compost heaps are covered with canvass, but unmistakable. The air is saturated with odor - manure and straw, rotting foods - all heating up, beginning to cook. A possum slinks by, eyes Cleo, and disappears from view. A swarm of shiny black ravens descend on the heaps. Scavengers. Textured by breath of compost, of ravens, of possums, of the honeyed woodbine; the evening air wakes my senses. In my belly, I feel the eros of exchange.

A breeze picks up, carries a sour after-scent. What felt sensuous now turns rank, disturbing. Did the shellmound dwellers make their piles of refuse and bury their dead downwind from their huts? Or did they simply become inured to these smells? Was their experience of smells we modern Westerners find noxious quite different? What was the effect of all this rot on Strawberry Creek? Ed Luby says that the lime in the shell may have acted as a disinfectant. Did this prevent disease from decomposing food and corpses? I watch the ravens attack the compost, voracious now in their pillaging. Animals and birds in shellmound days must have scavenged the shells and bones and picked them clean.

Heady from the mix of scents and the shifting hues of dusk, I wend my way towards my house. It's hard to imagine living so intimately with the cycles of decay. Images from my recent forays spin through my thoughts, coincide. Both burial ground and dump are separated from where we in our community eat and sleep, where children play. In both settings, workmen protect themselves with goggles and masks, with boots, gloves, and hats. Little trucks with chains and hooks carry coffins while similar trucks with claw-like pincers disentangle and carry trash.

Of course the dump appears foul, the cemetery, at least on the surface, antiseptically clean. But the two work on the same principle. Both are stations in an immense recycling plant. In one, it's animal, vegetable, and inorganic refuse that are decomposing; in the other, it's human bodies, the refuse left after we humans die. I see the two juxtaposed in the vast shellmound home of our worldÑwhere life breaks down, feeds the gulls, the worms, the bacteria, and feeds into new life.

For safety and comfort, it does seem to make sense to separate our 21st-century houses from the garbage dump and the cemetery. To insure a sweet, pleasant ambiance, to protect ourselves from the dangers of disease, we humans have evolved towards separating out these venues. But there's another danger: Dividing our home up in this way - like dividing thought into safe and unsafe, sacred and ordinary, dark and light - can buffer and blind us; it prevents us from seeing fundamental relationship, the all encompassing give and receive.

This essay is adapted from several chapters of Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place
(Shambhala Publications, June 2003). ]