Archaeology and Ethnobiology of Late Holocene Bird Remains from the Northern Oregon Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological bird remains from the Oregon coast have recently received renewed attention. We contribute to this discussion with an analysis of bird remains from the Late Holocene Par-Tee site (35CLT20) in Seaside, Oregon. We sampled the Par-Tee avifaunal assemblage to near-redundancy and generated the largest sample from a single site on the Oregon Coast to date (N = 7,204). Our results support previous Oregon coast avifaunal assemblage analyses. The Par-Tee assemblage is dominated by near shore or estuarine birds including scoters, alcids, and shearwaters. There are also small amounts of unique species such as the California condor (*Gymnogypus californianus) and the short-tailed albatross (*Phoebastria albatrus), both of which are currently endangered and face conservation challenges. The Par-Tee avifaunal assemblage is diverse, but people at the site focused on acquiring the most accessible species in the near shore habitat. Our study of the Par-Tee bird remains helps clarify the nature of past human-bird interactions in coastal Oregon, emphasizes the importance of sample size in documenting species of conservation concern that may be rare in the archaeological record, and illustrates the value of zooarchaeological studies of archaeological legacy collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33356