Pacific Herring: Methodological and Interpretive Considerations of a Keystone Species for Zooarchaeological Analyses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Bones of the Pacific herring, abundant in many Pacific Northwest shell middens, are increasingly recognized as important indicators of past complex foodwebs and the ecosystemic role of humans. For decades, zooarchaeologists interpreted the presence of herring bones at these sites as reflecting indigenous fishing during a limited late winter-early spring season based on the conventional wisdom of commercial herring fisheries and studies with limited time-depth by fisheries biologists. Recent increasingly sophisticated studies of the Pacific herring genome paint a much richer mosaic of variability for herring spawning behavior across space and deeper time, in both a cyclical annular sense and an absolute diachronic Holocene trajectory. We review some methodological considerations at a macroscopic scale for using archaeological herring bones for such studies, and the interpretive potential of resulting ancient DNA analyses. A recent aDNA study of archaeological herring bones from several southern Salish Sea assemblages provides a case study. Methodological considerations at a macroscopic scale include construction of diachronic analytic units with good chronological control, and sampling appropriate skeletal elements for aDNA extraction at the molecular scale. Interpretive considerations include recognition of hypothetical causes of change in genomic composition of herring represented in a particular archaeological component.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35888.0