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Fine-screen animal bone and Pacific salmon ancient DNA (aDNA) results from Northwest Coast shell midden sites, together with other kinds of material culture, can provide detailed information on foodways, site-specific activities, and sociality. Seasonal use of the landscape may also be revealed through an understanding of place in the southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia, Canada. New results from column sample faunal analysis at the Pender Canal site are considered in conjunction with previously identified fauna. Alongside site characteristics, zooarchaeological and aDNA species identification data are employed to help reconstruct activities that people undertook. These tasks and their social implications at Pender Canal are contextualized with a discussion of several similar data sets from contemporary sites in the region. Temporal patterns in small fish remains and ancient salmon DNA at Pender Canal correspond with region-wide changes in land use, helping us interpret the formation of Coast Salish social relationships and identities over millennia.

A genomewide adapter-mediated emulsion PCR amplification protocol was developed and applied to explore ancient mammalian samples estimated to be between 45,000 and 69,000 years old. The technique yields substantial quantities of nuclear DNA for even small amounts of ancient remains with low levels of endogenous DNA preservation and hence could be applied to ancient DNA genomics to study extinct phyla.

•We test minimally-invasive sampling techniques for ZooMS analysis of bone objects.•Polishing films are the most effective minimally-invasive ZooMS sampling method.•The majority of bone objects at EjTa-4 were manufactured from deer bone.

Accurate sex identification of archaeological turkey remains is important for deciphering hunting and husbandry practices in pre-contact North America, particularly in the Southwest United States and Mesoamerica where domestic turkeys were raised. Although the sexual dimorphism of turkeys means that relatively complete elements can be distinguished using osteometric approaches, sexing fragmentary or juvenile remains is challenging. Here, we propose a simple and highly-sensitive co-amplification approach which targets highly-repetitive DNA (hrDNA) sequences on the turkey W chromosome. This technique simultaneously co-amplifies both hrDNA and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) fragments: the amplification of the W chromosome identifies the heterogametic sex (females), while the mtDNA fragment acts as an internal positive control to monitor for false negative results. To demonstrate the sensitivity and accuracy of this technique, we applied it to 20 modern turkeys and 117 archaeological turkey bones from 25 sites (ca. AD700–1700), including 32 samples from Sand Canyon Pueblo (AD1250–1300). We amplified ancient DNA from 86% of the ancient remains, demonstrating the sensitivity of the technique for targeting nuclear DNA. The correspondence between morphological size and the genetic sex identification for 100% of the complete skeletal elements demonstrates the accuracy and robusticity of this approach. Although within the larger regional assemblage, more males than females were identified (61% vs 39%), the site-specific analysis at Sand Canyon Pueblo suggests that adult male and female turkeys were present in a relatively even ratio.

Long-term use of herring by Alaska Natives is not well-documented over space or through time, yet this information can illuminate pre-industrial patterns of herring abundance and distribution. Such information is important to understand the sustained relationships Alaska Native fishers and egg collectors have had with herring. Understanding the genetics of pre-industrial herring may also inform management of the fish and fisheries to insure their survival into the future. In this paper, we attempt a contextualized account of the long-term history of Alaska Native herring fisheries, bringing together archaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistorical data. We tie these together as background for presenting the preliminary results of the NSF-funded project, The Archaeology of Herring: Reconstructing the Past to Redeem the Future(No. 1203868). We have now tested 84 herring bone samples from 17 archaeological sites in Alaska expanding beyond Speller et al. (2012), having tripled the earlier archaeological dataset. The oldest herring bones identified archaeologically in Alaska are dated to more than 10,000calBP. Early Holocene and Middle Holocene sites have also yielded herring bones, although most of the record dates to the last 2400years. Preservation of genetic information is effectively complete for the last 2400years, but achievable back to the terminal Pleistocene (68% success rate for samples between 10,500 and 2400cal BP). This gives considerable confidence to the potential to expand the analyses and develop a richer pattern of biological variability. The resulting data show genetic continuity between archaeological and modern herring populations. The main technical challenge for the future is to extract adequate amounts of nuclear DNA from the ancient samples for identifying more informative DNA markers that can be used to more effectively reveal any population diversity and/or population size changes over time when compared to modern herring.