This paper introduces a special issue of BC Studies featuring nine papers on the archaeology and Indigenous history of the 'outer coast' of British Columbia.

Coastal British Columbia is largely a rugged fjord-land archipelago. It has not always been so – over time, the coastline has changed configuration dramatically and the fauna and flora have seen multiple successions and extirpations. Through this, for the last 11,000 RCYBP years at least, resilient people made their living from the ocean and the land, shrugging off or taking advantage of environmental change. Similarly, archaeologists have worked the nooks and crannies of the coast for decades, surveying in the dense forest and digging in the deep middens, subject to similar environmental conditions as those they study and making quiet progress in regional culture histories. In more recent years, this area has been thrust to the forefront of research into the First Peopling of the American continents. As the Clovis First model began to be questioned, alternate modes and routes for the arrival of humans were brought in from the sidelines, including the hypothesized west coast route (e.g., Fladmark 1979). Not much research had been focused on this route, perhaps as Easton (1992) suggests, because of the terrestrial mindset of many archaeologists. Perhaps also, the prospects of finding sites on the deeply drowned landscapes or in the rugged, heavily forested hinterland was prohibitively daunting and led to a pessimistic outlook on success.

The British Columbia Heritage Trust has provided financial assistance to this p· roject to support conservation of our heritage resources, gain further knowledge and increase public understanding of the complete history of British Columbia.

This online exhibition aims to offer access to culturally, socially, historically, and sensorially different experiential contexts of “the guts”. Its visual display allows the visitor a glimpse into the variety and richness of embodied self-definition, human imagination about our (as well as animal) bodies’ physiology and functioning, our embodied exchange with the external world, and the religious significance of the way we are ‘made’ as living creatures. The project has been organised by a classicist, Chiara Thumiger (Cluster of Excellence Roots, Kiel), and sinologist, Angelika Messner (CAU University, Kiel) and has been sponsored by the Exzellenzcluster Roots at the CAU Kiel. The project brings together a variety of academics and artists who are working on different cultures in various parts of the world. My contribution can be viewed at: https://comparative-guts.net/ayurvedic-medicine/

The Standard Penetration Test (SPT) is the most widely used method for dynamic testing of soils. The test is simple and robust but difficult to control and not fully standardized. As a result, experimental results typically show large variations and poor repeatability. To mitigate that correction factors such as energy normalization and rod length have been introduced in SPT practice. This study provides an examination of the two correction factors using models based on the discrete element method (DEM).