Description

This guide was developed to help identify Culturally Peeled Trees. Culturally Peeled Trees are a specific type of Culturally Modified Tree. The term is used to describe the mostly pre-reservation practice by aboriginal or native people of 'peeling,' or removing, the bark/cambium layer of a tree for a variety of procurement and symbolic purposes. The bark peel results in a very distinctive scar and heal-over which is distinguishable from other natural and human-caused injuries to the tree. Using tree-ring analysis, these scars can be crossdated, providing us with an invaluable record of the past including very precise dates -even seasonality- about when people were present on the land.