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They didn’t seem to work as fish traps or anything to do with canoes, although a couple of sites appeared to have been modified to allow canoe access along the edges.

But they didn’t share the characteristics of the ice barricades either.

“The archaeologist didn’t think they were man-made features, but couldn’t say they weren’t,” Harper said. “On the other hand, I, the geologist, didn’t think they were natural features, but couldn’t say they weren’t. Conventional science had basically failed.”

He enlisted the help of ethnologist and linguist Randy Bouchard, who recently completed a 30-year annotated translation of Boas. University of Victoria ethno-botanist Nancy Turner introduced him to Daisy Sewid-Smith, a Kwakwaka’wakw linguist and educator whose roots were with the Mamaliliqala tribe of Village Island, and to Chief Kim Recalma-Clutesi of Qualicum who is married to the carver and elder, Kwakwaka’wakw Chief Adam Dick.

“Adam is illiterate,” Harper said. “He was never permitted by his parents to go away to residential school because he was to be a keeper of knowledge.”

Keep it, he did. Late last year, Chief Dick recalled an old song about the clam gardens.

“It’s a four-verse song,” Harper said. “Gilford Island songs are all four-verse songs, I’ve learned. It’s a song about kids helping their mother and one of the verses is about going out to help build the clam garden.”

Now they had a word — lo xwi we — and Bouchard tracked it down in an unpublished dictionary compiled by Boas and held in the American Philosophical Society collection.

“Only Randy could come up with this,” Harper said. “The second line of page 404 contains the word ‘lo xwi we’ and definitions, one of which is ‘low tide mark’ and another which means ‘place of rolling rocks together.’ Boas never understood their function.”

The reason Boas and the other ethnologists missed the significance of the clam gardens, Harper surmised, is because of their own cultural biases in an age of high Victorian sexual prudery.

“I’m learning about clams,” Harper said. “They are often associated with female genitalia and they were under-reported in the ethnographic literature because they were considered a lower food form.”

Then Bouchard turned up an obscure monograph on the Lummi Indians of northern Washington that was published by Bernhard J. Stern at Columbia University in 1934.

It contained a single crucial paragraph, which describes the creation of a clam garden at a place called Elelung on Orcas Island.

“They took the largest rocks that were in the clam bed and moved them out to extreme low water marks, setting them in rows like a fence along the edge of the water,” Stern wrote. “This made clam digging very easy compared to what it had previously been because there are only small pebbles and sand to dig in. It is exceptional to cultivate clam beds in this manner and while other clam beds are used by everyone in the tribe, here only the owners who cultivated the bed gathered.”