The Olympia oyster (Ostreola conchaphila) is the native oyster of the Pacific coast of North America from Alaska to Mexico. The name is derived from the important 19th century oyster industry near Olympia, Washington, in Puget Sound.

Native American peoples consumed O. conchaphila everywhere it was found, with consumption in San Francisco Bay so intense that enormous mounds of oyster shells were piled over thousands of years. (One of the largest, near the mouth of Temescal Creek and the eastern end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, is now buried under an immense Ikea superstore.) O. conchaphila nearly disappeared from San Francisco Bay following overharvest during the California gold rush (1848-50s) and massive silting from hydraulic mining in California's Sierra Nevada (1850s-1880s). California's most valuable fishery from the 1880s-1910s was based on imported Atlantic oysters, not the absent native. But in the 1990s, O. conchaphila once again appeared in San Francisco Bay, surprisingly in some of the most polluted waters of the bay near the Chevron Oil refinery in Richmond, California.

External links

Emeryville Shellmound:

• http://emeryville.wli.net/public_info/archaeology_history.htm
• http://sscl.berkeley.edu/arf/publications/54.html