Estimating Ancient Urchin Size on the West Coast of Vancouver Island

Summary

Archaeological remains of sea urchins along the Northwest Coast have not been a subject of concerted archaeological research, but has the potential to provide new insights into Indigenous marine subsistence practices, and the complexities of pre-contact First Nations’ ecological roles within the marine ecosystems they inhabited. The focus of this report is to investigate the importance of red sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus) size in the archaeological record at the sites of DfSh- 7 (Huu7ii) and 93T (Hup’kisakuu7a) in the area that is now called Barkley Sound. I discuss the potential for preserved urchin hemipyramids (an element in urchin jaws) to predict ancient urchin body sizes. To this end, I measured a series of urchin hemipyramids and test sizes to improve on an existing regression based method for estimating archaeological specimens in Barkley Sound.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Student Research in Coastal and Community Archaeology at the University of Victoria

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16543