Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Development Of Complex Fishing Technologies

Among maritime hunter-gatherer-fishers around the world, the adaptation from subsistence strategies that emphasized shellfish collecting towards one which people were increasingly fishing marked a critical transition because it provided more food for society, supported semi-permanent habitation, and restructured sociopolitical organization. Previous scholarship has documented changes in human diet and settlement associated with the introduction of new fishing technologies.

Less emphasis has been placed on understanding the circumstances that led people to shift strategies and develop the tools to access a greater number of marine resources. This doctoral dissertation project will investigate how indigenous people on the California Channel Islands adapted specialized fishing strategies that were supported by local marine ecosystems and how people innovated new technologies to target these resources.

In doing so, they will address fundamental questions in anthropological archaeology such as why intensive subsistence economies emerge and how cultural innovations materialize in variable environments.This research is in collaboration with local indigenous stakeholders. An Advisory Board of Native community members was created to ensure that communication is transparent, research is ethical and to create opportunities for community input and participation at varying stages of the project.

This research will utilize existing, unanalyzed museum collections from three archaeological sites to address how environmental conditions influenced the emergence of intensive fishing practices and the evolution of fishing technologies, such as the single-piece shell fishhook and sewn-plank canoes. The research focuses on indigenous populations from the California Channel Islands.

Drawing from evolutionary theory, researchers will model human behavior and decision making based on habitat suitability. They use intertidal shellfish population density data and calculated area of wetlands as measures of habitat suitability. Researchers will analyze all faunal remains from the study sites.

Additionally, they will submit select samples of artifacts and raw materials associated with the construction and maintenance of sewn-plank canoes for geochemical analysis. These data will determine the source of raw materials necessary for canoe construction and provide valuable insight to debates regarding the role of long-distance exchange and intensified resource acquisition in the development of sociopolitical complexity.

Lastly, this study will demonstrate the tremendously valuable data available in unexplored museum collections.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.