Virginia L. Butler

Resource depression on the Northwest Coast of North America

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.

Archaeological Evidence for Resilience of Pacific Northwest Salmon Populations and the Socioecological System over the last ~7,500 years

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.

Archaeological data provide alternative hypotheses on Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) distribution, abundance, and variability

Significance Over the last century, Pacific herring, a forage fish of tremendous cultural, economic, and ecological importance, has declined in abundance over much of its range. We synthesize archaeological fisheries data spanning the past 10,000 y from Puget Sound in Washington to southeast Alaska to extend the ecological baseline for herring and contextualize the dynamics of modern industrial fisheries. While modern herring populations can be erratic and exhibit catastrophic declines, the archaeological record indicates a pattern of consistent abundance, providing an example of long-term sustainability and resilience in a fishery known for its modern variability. The most parsimonious explanation for the discrepancy between herring abundance in the ancient and more recent past is industrial harvesting over the last century. Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), a foundation of coastal social-ecological systems, is in decline throughout much of its range. We assembled data on fish bones from 171 archaeological sites from Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington to provide proxy measures of past herring distribution and abundance. The dataset represents 435,777 fish bones, dating throughout the Holocene, but primarily to the last 2,500 y. Herring is the single-most ubiquitous fish taxon (99% ubiquity) and among the two most abundant taxa in 80% of individual assemblages. Herring bones are archaeologically abundant in all regions, but are superabundant in the northern Salish Sea and southwestern Vancouver Island areas. Analyses of temporal variability in 50 well-sampled sites reveals that herring exhibits consistently high abundance (>20% of fish bones) and consistently low variance (<10%) within the majority of sites (88% and 96%, respectively). We pose three alternative hypotheses to account for the disjunction between modern and archaeological herring populations. We reject the first hypothesis that the archaeological data overestimate past abundance and underestimate past variability. We are unable to distinguish between the second two hypotheses, which both assert that the archaeological data reflect a higher mean abundance of herring in the past, but differ in whether variability was similar to or less than that observed recently. In either case, sufficient herring was consistently available to meet the needs of harvesters, even if variability is damped in the archaeological record. These results provide baseline information prior to herring depletion and can inform modern management.

Tui Chub Taphonomy and the Importance of Marsh Resources in the Western Great Basin of North America

Debates about the importance of marsh ressources 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 staning- and thus these attributes were not usefull 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

Local and Traditional Knowledge and the Historical Ecology of Pacific Herring in Alaska

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.

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

ABSTRACT 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 based on macofossil evidence of abrupt wetland burial. Paleotsunami origins of the four landward thinning sand sheets are confirmed by the presence of ocean diatom taxa and beach sand grains. Long wave run-up in the low-gradient Waatch floodplain ranged from 2.5 to 4.5 km up-valley distance from the present tidal inlet shoreline. Paleotsunami overtopping of the Neah Bay barrier ridge (6–8-m elevation North American Vertical Datum of 1988 [NAVD88]) provides the first estimates of paleotsunami minimum run-up height at the entrance to the Juan de Fuca Strait.

Seeking Balance in “Human Impacts” Research. Comment on Julio Baisre's “Setting a Baseline for Caribbean Fisheries”

Baisre’s main points are these. Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean had limited effectsonfisheriesoroverallecosystemstructure. Previous researchers have misinterpreted patterning in archaeological and historical records and suggested trends reflect overfishing as opposed to environmental or other cultural forces (e.g., fishing location, trade). Current crises in fisheries cannot be helped by studies of ancient records, since the source of the problems are tightly linked to relatively recent events, not ancient ones. I do not know the Caribbean record well enough to evaluate Baisre’s specific criticisms, so Iwill focusonsomeof the larger issues he raises. I share his general concern that many researchers studying past human ecology have too readily concluded that trends in zooarchaeological records reflect human overexploitation, without scrutinizing other potential hypotheses. Three important paperswrittenalmostadecadeagoprobablydid

On the Role of Coastal Landscape Evolution in Detecting Fish Weirs: A Pacific Northwest Coast Example From Washington State

ABSTRACT In North Americas Pacific Northwest, archaeologists have extensively researched coastal fish weirs—one of several types of mass fish capture technologies used by precontact peoples—and their role in the development of delayed return economies and implications for social organization. Fish weirs, however, are typically situated in areas that are susceptible to a range of geomorphic and anthropogenic factors that affect their preservation and visibility. Given the importance of these capture facilities to understanding the histories of coastal peoples, a better understanding of these factors, and how they affect the archaeological record, is needed. Using the recently augmented coastal fish weir record in Washington State as a case study, we explore these factors by compiling an expanded database of 22 sites and 36 radiocarbon dates and systematically consider how coastal geomorphological processes operating along the Northwest Coast affect the age and distribution of fish weirs. Through this analysis, we argue that regional patterns in cultural use and taphonomy of the construction of fish weirs, as well as human responses to coastal dynamism, must be considered through the lens of geomorphic and anthropogenic factors that affect the coastal margin on a local and regional scale.

Anthropogenic habitat alteration leads to rapid loss of adaptive variation and restoration potential in wild salmon populations

Anthropogenic habitat alterations can drive phenotypic changes in wild populations. However, the underlying mechanism (i.e., phenotypic plasticity and/or genetic evolution) and potential to recover previous phenotypic characteristics are unclear. Here we investigate the change in adult migration characteristics in wild salmon populations caused by dam construction and other anthropogenic habitat modifications. Strikingly, we find that dramatic allele frequency change from strong selection at a single locus explains the rapid phenotypic shift observed after recent dam construction. Furthermore, ancient DNA analysis confirms the abundance of a specific adaptive allele in historical habitat that will soon become accessible through a large restoration (i.e., dam removal) project. However, analysis of contemporary samples suggests the restoration will be challenged by loss of that adaptive allele from potential source populations. These results highlight the need to conserve and restore critical adaptive genetic variation before the potential for recovery is lost.

An efficient and reliable DNA-based sex identification method for archaeological Pacific salmonid (Oncorhynchus spp.) remains

Pacific salmonid (Oncorhynchus spp.) remains are routinely recovered from archaeological sites in northwestern North America but typically lack sexually dimorphic features, precluding the sex identification of these remains through morphological approaches. Consequently, little is known about the deep history of the sex-selective salmonid fishing strategies practiced by some of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Here, we present a DNA-based method for the sex identification of archaeological Pacific salmonid remains that integrates two PCR assays that each co-amplify fragments of the sexually dimorphic on the Y chromosome (sdY) gene and an internal positive control (Clock1a or D-loop). The first assay co-amplifies a 95 bp fragment of sdY and a 108 bp fragment of the autosomal Clock1a gene, whereas the second assay co-amplifies the same sdY fragment and a 249 bp fragment of the mitochondrial D-loop region. This method’s reliability, sensitivity, and efficiency, were evaluated by applying it to 72 modern Pacific salmonids from five species and 75 archaeological remains from six Pacific salmonids. The sex identities assigned to each of the modern samples were concordant with their known phenotypic sex, highlighting the method’s reliability. Applications of the method to dilutions of modern DNA samples indicate it can correctly identify the sex of samples with as little as ~39 pg of total genomic DNA. The successful sex identification of 70 of the 75 (93%) archaeological samples further demonstrates the method’s sensitivity. The method’s reliance on two co-amplifications that preferentially amplify sdY helps validate the sex identities assigned to samples and reduce erroneous identifications caused by allelic dropout and contamination. Furthermore, by sequencing the D-loop fragment used as a positive control, species-level and sex identifications can be simultaneously assigned to samples. Overall, our results indicate the DNA-based method reported in this study is a sensitive and reliable sex identification method for ancient salmonid remains.