“…Any man who pits his intelligence against a fish…”: What a diverse set of fishing tools and strategies tells us about the Earliest Known fishing communities of Baja California.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fishing Technologies: Exploring Manufacturing Techniques and Styles, Traditions, Exchange, Migration and More" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The recovery of several dozen single-piece shell fishhooks, fishing weights, indirect evidence for the use of small-gauge nets and harpoons from Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene contexts on Isla Cedros Baja California provides the earliest definitive evidence for a fully developed Maritime Adaptation on the coast of the Californias. Other early contexts place people in coastal environments and provide some indication of littoral gathering, but up to this point lack evidence for sophisticated, broad spectrum exploitation for the full scope of available marine resources with technologies specifically and exclusively designed for use in marine environments. It is incumbent upon us to pay attention to not only the chronology and geography, but also to the physical evidence for knowledge systems and technological capabilities possessed by the earliest inhabitants of the Pacific Coast of the Americas. By doing so, we will be able to infer a great deal more about the routes taken and choices made by the ancestral native populations that were the last humans to enter and settle a continental landmass.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Fishing Technologies: Exploring Manufacturing Techniques and Styles, Traditions, Exchange, Migration and More

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53357