Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of Prehistoric Cultural and Natural Processes on Waterbirds in the Pacific Northwest Coast

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. Donald K. Grayson, Ms. Kristine M. Bovy will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She is identifying and analyzing bird bones from three large, previously excavated archaeological sites in the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America: Watmough Bay (San Juan Islands, WA), Minard (Washington Coast) and Umpqua/Eden (Oregon Coast). Previous work suggests these sites were occupied during the past 1,000- 3,000 years. Ms. Bovy plans to obtain additional radiocarbon dates in order to better determine the ages of the bones recovered. Her goal is to evaluate how the kinds of birds represented at these sites has changed through time, and why these changes occurred. Assuming that significant change is discovered (and preliminary research suggests that such change did occur), the research will focus on three prime factors to explain those changes: human hunting, climate change and earthquake events. Ms. Bovy's research is interdisciplinary and will contribute to both archaeological and biological questions. For instance, her work will provide information on the history of the interaction between people and birds in the Pacific Northwest Coast. Early anthropologists and Euro-American explorers in this region describe the many effective methods that native peoples had for hunting birds. In particular, they used a number of different kinds of nets to catch large numbers of feeding and flying waterfowl, including submerged and large hanging nets. However, the antiquity and impact of such practices is unknown. Were bird nets used early on or only later when other food resources had been depleted due to increasing human populations? This research may also contribute to the debate about how and when social inequality developed among native Northwest Coast peoples. One hypothesis suggests that inequalities evolved, in part, because many food resources in this region are localized in time and space and therefore could be owned and defended by individuals or families (e.g., salmon returning to spawn). However, no one has considered the role that birds, which are at times hunted in localized and defensible spots on the landscape, could have played in this setting, nor has anyone considered the impact that such hunting may have had on the birds themselves. This research is also important because it will provide much needed long-term data on waterbird populations in the Pacific Northwest Coast. Systematic observations of birds are limited to the past 50-100 years, and many ornithologists and ecologists are realizing that longer-term studies are needed to better understand and manage these populations. Knowing how natural processes such as climatic change, earthquakes and sea-level rise affected birds in the past, could help us predict their responses to similar events in the future, such as global warming.