Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Prehistoric Resource Depression and Intensification on Kodiak Island, Alaska

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

National Science Foundation support will allow Robert Kopperl, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Washington, to finish his dissertation research: testing the proposition that prehistoric hunter-gatherers had an impact on their prey populations which in turn affected their diets and ultimately their social organization. The geographic focus is on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where the native Alaskan Alutiiq hunted sea mammals and fished for over 7000 years before Russian colonization. For almost a century, anthropologists have proposed that intensive salmon harvesting played a large role in the development of socially complex cultures on the north Pacific coast, but no cause for this intensification has been determined. This dissertation research tests the hypotheses that harvest pressure on local prey populations caused a dietary shift from larger-bodied sea mammals to a greater focus on smaller-bodied marine fish and salmon, and that this shift preceded, and therefore may have caused, the development of social complexity on Kodiak Island. Testing these hypotheses will involve a combination of analytical techniques, including the examination of animal bones recovered from several archaeological sites spanning over 6000 years for evidence of prey choices and butchery and carcass transportation patterns by the occupants of the sites. Additionally, paleoclimatic data for the region during this period will be examined as another agent that could have affected prey populations. Finally, changes in hunting and fishing tool technology will be explored for the role it may have played in changing prey preference. Support for these hypotheses can be seen in declines in the proportion of sea mammal bone to fish bone over time in archaeological assemblages, as well as changes in age structures of the individual animals that the bones represent, depending on the behavioral habits of each species. Changes in the parts of carcasses deposited at each site will be informative of the distance foragers traveled from the site to hunt and fish. Finally, how long ago these changes occurred will be correlated with the known dates of the first evidence of cultural complexity on Kodiak Island, approximately 1500-2000 years ago. The oldest of the archaeological sites examined is very poorly dated; therefore charcoal and bone samples recovered from the site will be submitted for radiocarbon dating. This research combines zooarchaeological, paleoclimatic, and artifactual data for the first analysis of its kind with this time-depth, examining prehistoric subsistence changes on Kodiak Island from shortly after initial colonization over 7000 years ago until Russian contact. Testing the proposition that human or climatic impacts on prey populations had a causal role in the development of cultural complexity will offer a theoretically grounded starting point to further investigate the development of prehistoric social complexity on the coast. Additionally, this research has implications for future management of certain animal populations by examining their interactions with humans in the past.