Subsistence Practice as Remote Sensing on the Northwest Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The underwater landscape of the Northwest Coast is largely concealed from direct perception by human senses. Except in a literally shallow and transient way, humans cannot visit this hidden environment. The intertidal, surficial and nearshore resources were, of course, known in superb detail. Yet, Indigenous communities also held accurate and granular mental models of the deeper seafloor and its affordances, such as halibut banks, lingcod reefs, and dentalia grounds. I argue that fine-grained and specific knowledge of the sea floor and its affordances was gained by feeling the bottom with fishing gear or other instrumentation, necessarily practiced from watercraft. In this view, bottom fishing is simultaneously an act of subsistence and an act of perception. Water depth, the regime of currents down the water column, benthic biota, and the benthic substrate can all be determined by visual and haptic effects through fishing gear, and constitute a bycatch of submarine landscape knowledge. Drawing on theories of the environment and the maritime world developed by Tim Ingold, Jakob von Uexküll, and Hein Bjerck, I will argue that canoe-borne fishing practices embedded a practice of “remote sensing,” which itself enabled accurate Indigenous cartographies of the deep.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36999.0