An Update of the Prehistoric Native American Fishery of San Francisco Bay

Summary

It has been a decade since Gobalet et al. (2004: Trans. Am. Fish. Soc. 133:801-833) summarized the fishes found in archaeological sites on San Francisco Bay. Numerous additional excavations have been completed in the last ten years and this report adds 32,000 bones to the totals from 23 archaeological sites from seven counties. By number of specimens found at the sites collectively, bat ray, sturgeons, herrings and sardines, northern anchovies, salmon and trout, New World silversides, surfperches, and minnows (freshwater) are found in the greatest abundance. This summary, however, obscures some fascinating regional concentrations of fishes. For instance, numerous longjaw mudsuckers dominate a site in the south bay, splittail (freshwater) are abundant at sites in northern Marin County, and Larkspur and Angel Island share characteristics of the fish fauna of the East Bay sites. Because of the attention to fine-mesh screening, it is heartening to see that the tiny bones of true smelt are now being recovered with regularity.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancestral Native American Archaeology of the San Francisco Bay Area   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage