The Historical Ecology of Dolphins and Porpoises off the Oregon and Pacific Northwest Coasts: Contributions from Zooarchaeology

Summary

Wide-scale excavations were undertaken in the middens at Seaside, Oregon in the 1960s and 1970s. However, due to the overwhelming amount of faunal material, much of it remains unanalyzed. This project focuses on the material from the Par-Tee midden (35CLT20). The only cetaceans analyzed from this midden are whales, leaving a knowledge gap about prehistoric human interaction with smaller cetaceans, such as dolphins and porpoises. Using the cetacean comparative and reference collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center, the small cetacean remains have been identified. Species composition and abundance data are compared with modern stranding data to help elucidate whether small cetaceans were actively hunted or if stranded animals were scavenged. Additionally, the small cetacean data from Seaside will be placed into the broader context of small cetacean exploitation in the northeastern Pacific Ocean and compared to data from other archaeological sites. This allows for a temporal and spatial analysis of small cetacean species abundances and distributions in the region. This data is also compared to herring data of the northeastern Pacific, a common food source of small cetaceans, to note if there is a possible correlation between the two.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20412