Emeryville’s Bay Street shopping center is packed. Cars fight for parking spaces in the center’s massive parking garages while pedestrians push carts full of shoe racks and spidery indoor plants from IKEA between them seeming not to care whether or not they get hit. On the street level, shoppers are masters at multi-tasking, too busy to sit down and eat. They opt to balance a slice of pizza from California Pizza Kitchen and a soda in one hand, Banana Republic shopping bags in the other while they race to Barnes and Noble – the only store that offers parking validation. The town on the edge of the bay has always been a bustling area for commerce. That doesn’t change just because its earlier inhabitants are buried beneath it.

Few people are aware that the shopping center sits on top of Emeryville Shellmound, which 2,500 years ago was a large Ohlone village. It was a place where the tribe discarded everything from dinner scraps, shellfish in particular, to the deceased. Over time this pile of waste became a large mound of, you guessed it, shells, as hints the name Shellmound. Despite being designated a state registered landmark in 1939, Emeryville’s sacred grounds were no match for developers.

“I couldn’t believe that something like this could happen,” explains Andres Cediel who created “Shellmound,” a documentary about the site. “We have a cultural site that is as old as the Parthenon in Greece. You don’t see anyone building on top of that.”

The Bay Street project isn’t the first time Shellmound has been disturbed. The site had actually been built over twice before the 1950s. During the 1870s, the area around the Shellmound became an amusement park, which operated until 1924 when prohibition forced the park to close down. Apparently no booze meant no fun. So Shellmound was leveled to make room for a paint factory, which remained on the site until 1998.

During the building of the new shopping center, nearly 400 bodies were found. According to Chuck Striplen, a Native American monitoring the mall’s construction, three bodies were unearthed while installing a grease tank.

The Emeryville Shellmound is one of several shellmounds in the Bay Area. There’s one in Berkeley, although it currently has a parking lot on top of it, one in Fremont’s Coyote Hills Regional Park and one in Vallejo.

Vallejo’s Shellmound, near Glen Cove Park, doesn’t look like much. With its tall grass, weeds, and thorny bushes, the place looks less like an ancient burial ground and more like someone let their yard get out of control. The tiny beach on the property didn’t have much luck either. Although the view of the bay and the Carquenez Bridge is gorgeous, it’s hard not to notice the small strip of sand is littered with everything from malt liquor bottles to candy wrappers.

“I like that the area is kept private,” says Ray Regan, who is caretaker of the property. “I don’t want crowds of people coming here looking for arrowheads.” Or in the case of the Emeryville Shellmound, building a mall on top of it. Still, the new condos built around the Vallejo property are inching pretty close.

But there are still reminders of Emeryville’s historical past. At the southeast corner of Shellmound Street and Ohlone Way, smashed between Old Navy and PF Chang’s Chinese Bistro, is a memorial to the site’s native peoples.

“For me it feels like we’re less than human because the memorial doesn’t even mention that there were people buried here,” said Ohlone descendent Corina Gould, who has never stepped inside the mall. Her group, Indian People Organizing for Change, has had annual protests the last four years on the day after Thanksgiving.

On a warm Thursday afternoon, the memorial is getting a lot of foot traffic. Walking through the front, across the street from the Steve Madden store, pedestrians skim the tall marble slab timelines and make their way down the winding path of the memorial. Although the hum of commuter traffic is always present, it is muted by the water flowing from a fountain and the unusually loud chirping of birds. There are other sounds too, like the guttural dry-heaving sound a stout man makes before he spits a large pastel yellow ball of flem next to the display on Ohlone tools. For many people at the shopping center, the memorial is just a shortcut to the Marriott across the street.

There more than 400 shellmounds recorded in the Bay Area, but only four are accounted for. That leaves 396 shellmounds to discover. What’s under your IKEA?