Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Humans and the Marine Environment: Fishing through Time in Monterey Bay, CA

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Cristie Boone will analyze how humans and the marine environment interacted over 8,000 years on the central coast of California, emphasizing the role fishing played in subsistence decisions. Fish are a key resource found in the region's archaeological sites, yet are often treated as a homogeneous category, rather than the biologically and behaviorally diverse resource they are. The different technologies and skill-sets necessary to catch them are rarely considered. This project examines how fish compare to other human foods, and how the role of fish in the diet changes over time and space. Ms. Boone's analysis will focus on identification of fish species from archaeological bones. It will also obtain nutritional analyses of commonly encountered species to construct prey rankings, and conduct direct radiocarbon dating of specimens to control for the effects of gophers and other rodents on archaeological site stratigraphy. Results will be combined with data on past marine and terrestrial environments to assess human responses to major climatic events. Archaeology and anthropology have used human behavioral ecology and optimal foraging theory (OFT) to investigate human subsistence for some time. This project introduces a modeling technique, long used in ecology but only minimally applied to anthropology, that permits more nuanced explorations of OFT models than currently performed. Dynamic state variable modeling expands the number of factors that can be included within an analysis, and can provide more realistic foraging predictions. This model can be expanded and applied to numerous archaeological contexts where people had to consider trade-offs between decisions. This project will address the multiple and sometimes divergent scenarios for the Monterey Bay's human prehistory. In a broader perspective, it explores how fishing interacts with other subsistence behaviors in a coastal hunter-gatherer setting and its relation to the emergence of social complexity. Currently fisheries management is attempting to prevent the world's fish populations from declining to the point of complete collapse. Archaeological research is recognized as a valuable source of long-term data to describe fish population characteristics from pre-industrial fishing contexts. Preliminary findings from analyzed assemblages already indicate that some species may be smaller today than they were in the past. This project's educational impacts include providing important laboratory opportunities for undergraduates. Several undergraduates have been trained in archaeological fish analysis and preparation of fish comparative skeletons. One student created her own research project using the assemblages and, under Ms. Boone's instruction, analyzed fish remains from two sites, presenting her paper at the Santa Clara Undergraduate Research Conference in 2008. Research will be presented at regional and national archaeological conferences, published in peer-reviewed journals, and a digital database and the modeling code provided for public use.