The Dutch East India Company ship, the Zuytdorp, likely crashed into the shore of Western Australia due to a storm and not bad navigation, new research has found. Published in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Flinders University archaeologists Dr Ruud Stelten and Professor Wendy van Duivenvoorde analysed ship logs, contemporary cartographic and navigational knowledge and weather patterns at the time in a bid to understand how the ship went down.

By decoding the DNA of the beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), a native plant that thrives in British Columbia, a team of multidisciplinary scientists is providing new insight into how ancestral Indigenous peoples stewarded plants across the province. 

Led by Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an assistant professor in Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Department of Indigenous Studies, the innovative study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), a major scientific journal. 

A new research collaboration between the K’ómoks First Nation and Simon Fraser University highlights how Indigenous cultural heritage policies can protect archaeological sites threatened by development, given inadequate provincial heritage protection laws.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, spotlights K’ómoks First Nation’s cultural heritage policy – developed to abate the onslaught of archaeological site destruction in their southern core territory (the Comox Valley, Hornby and Denman Islands) – and the need for provincial legislation and municipal policies to implement Nation-led archaeological site protection.