Fish, Fishing, and Fish Bones on the central California Coast

Summary

In much of Native western North America fish and the aquatic technologies used to exploit them were associated with intensive hunter-gatherer economies and heightened levels of socio-political complexity. Central California, however, is more commonly associated with exploitation of acorns, a resource that also encouraged dense, sedentary, storage-dependent populations The relative significance of fish to these less populous foraging groups has only recently become a focus of systematic study. Here we review salient diachronic patterns from over 200,000 fish bones from 99 sites investigated over the last 40 years with an eye toward variation related to technological change and/or economic intensification.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Bones are Not Enough": Research in Honor of Diane Gifford-Gonzalez   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage