An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Sustainable Oyster Harvesting Practices during the Woodland and Protohistoric Periods in the Lower Chesapeake Bay

Summary

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

In 2021, an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, marine biologists, and geologists was formed to answer the question: is it possible to infer which part of the estuary an oyster was harvested from based on morphology and bioindicators observed on archaeological shell? In the Lower Chesapeake Bay, there are three “zones” conducive to oyster growth—the intertidal, the shallow subtidal, and the deep subtidal. We have argued elsewhere that, except in the case of feasting, past peoples in the York River estuary, Virginia, harvested oysters sustainably by focusing their day-to-day collection on intertidal zones, leaving offshore subtidal parent reefs to spawn. To test this hypothesis, modern samples of oysters were collected from each zone in the York River. Attributes of modern oyster shells, including size, shape, presence of sponge boreholes, and associated biofoul, were used to characterize variations among samples as they related to harvest zones. In this paper, we compare the results of the modern oyster study to previous studies of archaeological shell collected from Woodland and Protohistoric sites on the York River to determine if the oyster fishery was harvested selectively in the past in accordance with sustainable practices and ritual activities as previously hypothesized.

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): 37458.0