Multi-Proxy Analysis of Sea Lion Hunting in the Northwestern Pacific

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Around the Pacific Rim sea lions have served as a valuable food source for coastal communities throughout the Holocene and as a globally valued product in the expanding Eurasian and American colonial and imperial trade networks of the past few centuries. In this talk I discuss the hunting of both Japanese and Steller sea lions in the northwestern Pacific. The Japanese sea lion is an extinct pinniped while the Steller sea lion is an extant, but threatened species in the region. To better understand human relationships with these species through time and what factors led to their current population statuses, I use a combination of ancient DNA, stable isotope, and archaeological datasets. Japanese sea lions from 11 archaeological sites around Hokkaido dating from the Early Jomon through the Okhotsk period were sampled. Steller sea lions from the Kuril Islands were sampled and include individuals dating to the Epi-Jomon, Okhotsk, 1800s, and modern period. Both sea lion species appear to have been resilient to millennia of hunting and climatic change up until the 1900s.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40221.0