The Archaeology of Herring: A 10-Year Effort to Overcome Technical Challenges, Part 1

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Alaska Natives and BC and Washington State First Nations have maintained sustainable relationships with herring over millennia. Over the past 10 years, we have been using molecular methods to study the ancient and modern DNA of Pacific herring to track changes in genetic diversity through time. Analysis of over 260 herring bones from 24 archaeological sites ranging from Puget Sound to Alaska shows that mitochondrial DNA is extremely well preserved for at least the last 2,400 years. Unfortunately, this locus is not informative for discriminating subregional populations of herring. As a result, we shifted from studying mitochondrial DNA to nuclear DNA. First, we had to build a regional database of modern Pacific herring against which to compare the ancient herring. For the modern herring, laboratory protocols were developed to remove intraspecific contamination and identify informative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) through restriction site-associated (RAD) sequencing. Most recently, we are exploring the use of hybridization capture and whole genome sequencing to track changes in population diversity and size at archaeological sites in Alaska and Washington state. Over the last decade, our tactics have evolved along with DNA technology itself, as well as the research questions we aim to address.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35673.0