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Extensive 2004 excavation of Cḯxwicən (pronounced ch-WHEET-son), traditional home of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in northwest Washington State, U.S.A., documented human occupation spanning the last 2700 years with fine geo-stratigraphic control and 102 radiocarbon samples. Remains of multiple plankhouses were documented. Occupation spans large-magnitude earthquakes, periods of climate change, and change in nearshore habitat. Our project began in 2012 as a case study to explore the value of human ecodynamics in explaining change and stability in human-animal relationships on the Northwest Coast through analysis of faunal and geo-archaeological records. Field sampling was explicitly designed to allow for integration of all faunal classes (birds, fish, mammals, and invertebrates), thus facilitating our ability to track how different taxa were affected by external factors and cultural processes. With over one million specimens, the faunal assemblage represents one of the largest on the North Pacific Coast. Invertebrate records reveal striking changes in intertidal habitat that are linked to the formation of the sheltered harbor and catastrophic events such as tsunamis. Analysis suggests a high level of consistency in the structure of resource use (evenness and richness) across 2150 years of occupation, despite increase in intensity of human use and a shift to plankhouse occupation. Trends in fish and invertebrate representation do not correspond to changing ocean conditions, while changes in abundance of herring, salmon, burrowing bivalves and urchins are consistent with impacts from tsunamis. Comparison of resource use between two well-sampled houses before and after one tsunami suggests that while both households were resilient, they negotiated the event in different ways.

Coastal shell middens are known for their generally excellent preservation and abundant identifiable faunal remains, including delicate fish and bird bones that are often rare or poorly preserved at non-shell midden sites. Thus, when we began our human ecodynamics research project focused on the fauna from Cḯx w icən (45CA523, pronounced ch - WHEET - son ), a large ancestral village of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, located on the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Port Angeles, Washington (USA), we anticipated generally high levels of bone identifiability. We quickly realized that the mammal bones were more fragmented and less identifiable than we had expected, though this was not the case with the bird and fish bone or invertebrate remains. To better understand why this fragmentation occurred at Cḯx w icən, we evaluate numerous hypotheses, including both post-depositional and behavioral explanations. We conclude that multiple factors intersected (to varying degrees) to produce the extreme bone fragmentation and low identifiability of mammal bones at the site, including bone fuel use, marrow extraction, grease rendering, tool production, and post-depositional breakdown. Using a human ecodynamics framework, we further consider how both social factors and external environmental forces may mediate human choices, such as the economic decision to use bone for fuel or render bone grease. We place our findings from Cḯx w icən in a regional context and discuss the potential of the approach for other coastal archaeological sites worldwide.

We analyzed sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) remains from Cḯxwicən (pronounced ch-WHEET-son), a 2700 year-old ancestral village of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in northwest Washington state, U.S.A., to improve understanding of how this species was used by Native American/First Nations peoples in the past. Though sablefish are abundant at Cḯxwicən, and limited ethnographic accounts indicate they were highly prized in northwestern North America, their remains are rare in regional archaeology. We present a body-size regression model for estimating the fork length (FL) of archaeologically represented sablefish and determining which habitats they were captured from (i.e. shallow, nearshore waters as juveniles or deepwater, offshore sites as adults). FL estimates for sablefish remains from Cḯxwicən indicate the site occupants exclusively targeted inshore juveniles. Comparisons of sablefish abundances over time show juvenile sablefish were reliably and sustainably harvested over the duration of the site's occupation despite major environmental perturbation from regional climate change and tectonic disturbances. However, patterns of sablefish use differ in two Cḯxwicən households, suggesting access to and consumption of sablefish was socially mediated.

A summed probability density function (spdf), generated from the catalog of 101 radiocarbon ages on wood and charcoal from the Cḯxwicən archaeological site (Washington State, USA), serves as a proxy for the site's occupational history over the last 2500 years. Significant differences between spdfs derived from a null model of population growth (a bootstrapped logistic equation) and the observed index suggest relatively less cultural activity at Cḯxwicən between about 1950–1750 cal BP, 1150–950 cal BP, and 650 to 550 cal BP; and increased activity between about 1350–1250 cal BP and 550–500 cal BP. Peaks in the Cḯxwicən spdf are closely echoed by those derived from English Camp and Cama Beach, the other intensively dated archaeological sites in the region, from about 1600 to 650 cal BP. The fluctuations at all three sites in that period appear to be predominantly associated with the availability of marine resources, as shown by a statistically significant correlation between the Cḯxwicən spdf and the abundance of fish remains in late Holocene sediments in Saanich Inlet, a fjord on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island. A dramatic fall in the Cḯxwicən spdf after 1250 cal BP, and the presence of sandy deposits in the village midden may reflect the impact of a tsunami triggered by earthquake “U” at the neighboring Cascadia plate boundary. Other tsunamis from this source over the last 2500 years apparently had more modest effects on activity levels at Cḯxwicən.

While most comparative and meta-analysis in archaeology would like to assume that taphonomic factors act randomly and do not bias the results of studies with many data points, archaeological records may suffer from systematic biases in preservation, sampling, recovery methods, analytic methods, reporting practices, or yet other factors. Using a life history and middle-range perspective, we outline an approach for assessing possible systematic biases and for explicitly evaluating factors that affect assemblages included in comparative analysis at any scale. We demonstrate the usefulness of the life history concept as a framework for holistically evaluating bias with a zooarchaeological case study from the northeast Pacific. Our comparative analysis of regional fishbone records shows that unusually high abundances of sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria)—a nutritious and highly valued, yet rarely reported, species—at one large Native American village on the coast of Washington State, USA, cannot be explained by post-depositional destruction, screen size effects, sample size effects, or differences in fishbone identification methods. Though this study focuses on zooarchaeology, the framework we present has potential value for any large-scale meta-analysis that seeks to identify cultural and environmental patterns in “noisy” archaeological data.

Zooarchaeologists have long recognized that assigning taxonomic identifications to animal remains is a subjective process, and recent studies have highlighted the need for data quality assurance standards in archaeofaunal research. Our study contributes to this growing interest in quality assurance by presenting simple quantitative methods for assessing the reproducibility of analytic results through blind reanalysis of animal remains that we developed during analysis of fishbone from Cḯxwicən, a large Native American village on the coast of Washington State, U.S.A. Given the large scale of the Cḯxwicən project – over 112,000 fish remains were documented by five different analysts over three years – there was a real possibility that inconsistencies in laboratory practices affected analytic results (e.g., number of identified specimens, taxa present and relative abundance, elements identified, burning frequencies). To evaluate the reproducibility of the Cḯxwicən fishbone data, and the possibility of “protocol drift” – changes in how specimens and bone modifications were identified over the course of analysis – we reanalyzed samples of fish remains that were previously documented during three discrete stages (beginning, middle, and end) of the Cḯxwicən project. The original data and the reanalysis results show close agreement in each stage, with only minor differences in the numbers of recorded specimens, taxonomic representation at family- and finer taxonomic levels, and body part representation assessed for a single taxonomic order. Identifying burning on bone was not very reproducible. Reproducibility studies such as this are useful for highlighting ambiguous identification criteria (e.g., in taxonomic assignment, bone modification), and could stimulate dialog among researchers about ways to address such issues in future studies. Increasing the implementation of these, and other, widely applicable methods should improve zooarchaeological data quality and stimulate further research on quality assurance in archaeology overall.

Evidence of large earthquakes occurring along the Pacific Northwest Coast is reflected in coastal stratigraphy from Oregon to British Columbia, where there also exists an extensive archaeological record of Native American occupation. Tse-whit-zen, a large Native American village dating between ∼2800 yrs BP and the historic era, located on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, was excavated with exceptionally fine stratigraphic control allowing for precise comparison of these natural and cultural records. Here we report on the ∼10,000 fish remains from one 2 × 2 m excavation block; this assemblage spans the timing of one seismic event, allowing study of changes in relative taxonomic abundance through time that may coincide with earthquakes or other environmental changes. Results indicate a wide variety of fish taxa were used throughout the dated occupation. Comparisons of fish use before and after one earthquake event shows a decline in salmon (Oncorhynchus sp.) and an increase in herring (Clu...

Zooarchaeologists make a range of analytical decisions that affect taxonomic identifications, measures of abundance, and, by extension, socio-environmental interpretations. One decision that is often not documented and/or justified is the question of which skeletal elements, or element fragments, should be identified. This situation is especially concerning for, but not limited to, zooarchaeological analysis of fish remains, as ichthyoarchaeologists have historically adopted varied approaches to element selection for taxonomic identification, ranging from identification of a few distinctive jaw elements to attempted identifications for all elements. Here, we argue the process of element selection should be approached more intentionally as a sampling issue, which would provide a framework for evaluating whether identified samples are representative of the recovered assemblages from which they derive, and potentially improve the efficiency of analysis. We use nestedness analysis and sampling to redundancy to illustrate the effects of element selection on taxonomic richness and relative abundances in fishbone assemblages from three cultural and biogeographic regions: the northeast Pacific, the Hawaiian Islands, and Aotearoa New Zealand. We find that both methods are effective for evaluating the representativeness of identified assemblages based on varied element sets, and our results demonstrate that, in many assemblages, identifying all elements provides redundant information about taxonomic representation (richness and relative abundance). In such cases, one could select fewer elements for identification and spend more time examining remains from additional parts of a site or carrying out specialized analyses, which would provide new insights about past environments or human-animal relationships. The proposed analytical strategy aims to help zooarchaeologists justify and make informed decisions about how many and which specific elements to include in any given analysis. Our study adds to the growing discourse on best practices in zooarchaeology.

A geologic cross-section was constructed across a narrow late Holocene beach plain in a small southwest-facing pocket beach in North Sand Point. Olympic National Park, Washington, to test hypotheses about net littoral drift, potential tectonic uplift, and paleotsunami runup height. Twenty topographic stations (0–12 m elevation NAVD88) and eight auger core sites (2–5 m depth) were examined to establish the stratigraphic development of the narrow beach plain (120 m width). Existing radiocarbon dates and new optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) analyses were used to establish the onset (∼1.5 ka) and termination (∼0.6 ka) of net beach progradation, confirming net northward littoral drift in latest Holocene time. The anomalous high elevations of the beach plain resulted from an abandoned foredune ridge (9 m elevation) developed above the prograded beach deposits (6 m elevation). No tectonic uplift is required to account for the beach plain elevations. A fine gravel layer (5–30 cm thickness) draped ...

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) have long been a critical resource in the marine food web of the Gulf of Alaska. While the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 wreaked havoc on Prince William Sound herring populations in the northern Gulf, the southern Gulf also has been impacted, if less severely, by commercial fishing, habitat degradation, and environmental changes over the past century. Just how much Southeast Alaska’s herring have been affected is a historical-ecological question. But debate around this question is being carried out in a political-ecological environment between commercial sac roe fishers (who since the 1970s have harvested roe primarily to supply Asian markets because Japan overfished its own herring stocks), subsistence fishers (largely Alaska Natives), and other stakeholders concerned about the effect of herring declines on the marine ecosystem.

The mammal and fish faunal record from eight sites on the Columbia River (Oregon, USA) dating to the last 2200 years is examined to study subsistence change before and after European contact. Results show an increased use of low-ranked resources before contact and increased use of high-ranked resources after contact, trends that are predicted from changing demography and human predation pressure.

Debates about the importance of marsh resources to prehistoric human subsistence in the western Great Basin are longstanding. Recent questions regarding the natural vs. cultural origin of fish remains in lakeside archaeological sites further impede understanding of ancient subsistence patterns. Taphonomic study of a huge assemblage of tui chub (Gila bicolor) remains from an archaeological site in Stillwater Marsh, western Nevada, was undertaken to identify agents of deposition in marsh settings. The Stillwater fish remains showed limited surface modification-cut marks, burning, and digestive etching and staining—and thus these attributes were not useful indicators of origin. Fish mortality profiles, reconstructed by regression analysis of body size, indicates cultural selection of young/small fish rather than natural catastrophic mass death. The low survivorship of vertebrae in the chub assemblage suggests differential treatment of cranial and postcranial body parts by cultural agents. The Stillwater site fish assemblage represents a vast number of small fish; the presence of small tui chub from archaeological sites throughout the western Great Basin suggests that prehistoric fishers targeted relatively small chub in the subsistence quest.

Les relations entre la nourriture a base de poissons et les strategies de predation sont examinees dans l'ordre de maniere a identifier celles de peches se rapportant a la culture Lapita. Les proprietes inherentes des herbivres/omnivores opposees a celles des carnivores suggerent que les manieres relatives aux strategies de peche sont plus adaptees pour attraper du poisson. Des comparaisons etablies a partir de neuf sites Lapita repartis depuis Les iles Mussau, la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee jusqu'a la Polynesie occidentale presentent des divergences dans la representation ichtyologique des depots fauniques. La plupart des assemblages melanesiens occidentaux comprennent des frequences similaires de carnivores et d'herbivores/omnivores tandis que les Lapita orientaux sont domines par des assemblages herbivores/omnivores

Archaeologists working in north-western North America often suggest that the low frequency of salmon cranial elements and abundance of vertebrae in prehistoric deposits reflects the cultural use of stored fish. While empirical documentation of salmon storage is certainly important, a variety of noncultural factors, particularly bone density, should be considered in interpreting body part frequencies. Bone densities of representative cranial and postcranial elements from 10 chinook salmon ( Oncorhynchus tshawytscha ) were measured using X-ray absorptiometry. Except for the otolith, most cranial elements have lower densities than postcranial bones. The role of bone density in structuring prehistoric salmon assemblages is explored through comparisons of density measures with element survivorships in three archaeological assemblages with low cranial element survivorship. The scarcity of cranial elements in two of the assemblages is best explained by density-mediated destruction, while cultural processing probably accounts for the dearth of head bones in the third assemblage.

The most secure evidence for early Holocene fishing in Pacific North-western North America resides in the huge deposit of 9500-7600-year-old salmonid remains from The Dalles Roadcut site (Columbia River, Oregon). Recently the cultural origin for the fish remains has been challenged. Here, criteria for distinguishing natural (fluvial) from cultural salmonid deposits are developed in order to determine the agents responsible for the Roadcut faunal materials. Comparative analysis of one natural and three cultural assemblages from riverine settings indicates that body-part representation and skeletal completeness vary between natural and cultural settings. Analysis of the Roadcut assemblage suggests the salmonid deposit results largely from cultural processes, although the strength of this conclusion is weakened by significant curatorial biases with the collection.

Archaeological data on the long history of interaction between indigenous people and salmon have rarely been applied to conservation management. When joined with ethnohistoric records, archaeology provides an alternative conceptual view of the potential for sustainable harvests and can suggest possible social mechanisms for managing human behavior. Review of the ~7,500-year-long fish bone record from two subregions of the Pacific Northwest shows remarkable stability in salmon use. As major changes in the ecological and social system occurred over this lengthy period, persistence in the fishery is not due simply to a lack of perturbation, but rather indicates resilience in the ecological–human system. Of several factors possibly contributing to resilience, low human population size and harvesting pressure, habitat enhancement, and suppression of competing predators do not appear to be of major importance. Flexible resource use, including human use of a range of local resources, many of which are linked in a food web with salmon, likely contributed to resilience. Most important were the beliefs and social institutions (including ownership, regulation, rituals, and monitoring) that placed restraints on salmon use as a common pool resource. In contrast, only a small fraction of our modern society relies economically on or has direct interaction with the fish, which limits our concern and willingness to fundamentally change behaviors that contribute to habitat degradation and loss, the main challenges facing salmon populations today. Salmon recovery efforts may benefit substantially from investing more resources into establishing links between community groups and actual fish populations, which would create a sense of proprietorship, one of the keys to resilience in the indigenous salmon fishery.

Peterson, C.D.; Cruikshank, K.M.; Darienzo, M.E.; Wessen, G.C.; Butler, V.L., and Sterling, S.L., 2013. Coseismic subsidence and paleotsunami run-up records from latest Holocene deposits in the Waatch Valley, Neah Bay, northwest Washington, U.S.A.: links to great earthquakes in the northern Cascadia Margin. Representative shallow cores (1–2-m depth) from the Waatch Valley (n = 10) and from Neah Bay back-barrier wetlands (n = 7) record four coseismic subsidence events and associated paleotsunami inundations during the last 1300 years in the North Central Cascadia Margin. Three of the subsidence events (SUB1, SUB2b, and SUB3) correlate to reported great earthquakes dated at AD 1700, about 1.1 ka, and about 1.3 ka. An additional subsidence horizon (SUB2a), which is newly discovered in the study area, might correlate to a widely reported paleotsunami inundation, dated between 0.7 and 0.9 ka in the study region. The magnitudes of paleosubsidence in the Waatch Valley are modest (about 0.5−1.0 m), as ba...