Herring

This dissertation examines multiple scales of Indigenous history on the Northwest Coast from the disciplinary perspective of archaeology. I focus on cultural lifeways archaeologically represented in two key domains of human existence: food and settlement. The dissertation consists of six individual case studies that demonstrate the utility of applying multiple spatial and temporal scales to refine archaeological understanding of cultural and historical variability on the Northwest Coast over the Mid-to-Late Holocene (ca. 5,000-200 BP). The first of three regionally scaled analyses presents a coast-wide examination of fisheries data indicating that Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) exhibit a pervasive and previously under-recognized importance in Northwest Coast Indigenous subsistence practices. Next, I use zooarchaeological data from the southern British Columbia coast to identify a pattern of regional coherence in Coast Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth hunting traditions reflecting the scale of intergenerational cultural practice. The third study re-calibrates the settlement history of a small and historically significant locality in Coast Tsimshian territory (Prince Rupert Harbour) to clarify the temporal resolution of existing radiocarbon datasets and test inferences about social and political change. Following this regional exploration of scale, I document site-specific temporal variability in archaeological fisheries data from a Nuu-chah-nulth ‘big-house’ reflecting climatic and socio-economic change. I examine Indigenous oral histories and archaeological datasets to evaluate these parallel records of settlement in the neighbouring territory of an autonomous Nuu-chah-nulth polity before and during the occupation of a large defensive fortress. Finally, I demonstrate how everyday foodways are archaeologically expressed and reflect ecological differences and active management strategies within several spatially associated sites over millennial timescales. These linked case studies offer new clarity into long-standing debates concerning archaeologically relevant scales of cultural-historical variability on the NWC. They collectively demonstrate an enduring regional and temporal coherence for key aspects of Indigenous resource use and settlement and a historical dynamism at finer scales. I argue this has cultural, historical, and archaeological significance as well as relevance for contemporary understandings of the Northwest Coast environment. I conclude that a focus on the pervasive aspects of the everyday over millennia offers insight into individual actions across broader patterns of history.

Abstract of a paper submitted for the II Symposium on Food History and Food Traditions in the World/ II МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ СИМПОЗИУМ "История еды и традиции питания народов мира", МСосква, МГУ, ФИЯР, 2015.
Published in:
I Международный симпозиум «История еды и традиции питания народов мира" 2015
( http://gastac.ru/abstracts.html )

This article presents an overview of the long term trends in the trading patterns for salted herring in the area of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea and their hinterlands in the period of c. 1600-1850. The market is defined as ‘the interaction between supply and demand to determine the market price and corresponding quantity bought and sold.’  In this period the north European herring market underwent several changes. This is analysed from four different points of view:
The first main section examines the main trading routes for herring in Northern Europe by use of records from the Sound toll registers as well as from accounts of herring imports in the German North Sea and Baltic cities. Then a number of price series for various parts of northern Europe give indications for the long term development of prices of herring. Following this an analysis of the consumption patterns of salted herring is carried out, and finally the influence of mercantilist policies is evaluated.

"Current concerns about the survival of marine life and the fishing industry have contributed to a rising interest in their past development. While much of the scholarship is focused on the recent past, this collection of essays presents new interpretations in the pre-industrial history of the fisheries by highlighting the consequences of the northern fisheries through an interdisciplinary approach, including the environment, economy, politics, and society in the medieval and early modern periods. A wide variety of topics related to the fisheries, such as settlement and spatial organisation, processing methods, trade, profitability and taxation, consumption, communication and cooperation, ranging from the Viking Age until industrialisation are dealt with in a long term perspective, offering new insights in the intriguing relationship between marine life and humanity.
Contributors are Inês Amorim, James H. Barrett, Christiaan van Bochove, Petra van Dam, Chloé Deligne, Carsten Jahnke, Alison M. Locker, Thomas H. McGovern, Sophia Perdikaris, Marnix Pieters, Peter Pope, Bo Poulsen, Callum M. Roberts, Louis Sicking, Dries Tys, Adri van Vliet, Annette de Wit, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz.

Key words: medieval; zooarchaeology; modern; social; institutions; marine; economy; early; archaeology; trade; landscape; cod; fisheries; herring; species; history

This study presents isotopic data (d13C and d15N from bone collagen) for 104 samples representing 29 vertebrate taxa from late pre-contact through to contact era (ca. 2000 – 100 BP) Haida Gwaii (British Columbia, Canada) from a wide variety of mostly marine organisms. The results demonstrate the considerable isotopic variability that characterizes potential prey items in coastal contexts and underscores the need for baseline faunal data to interpret human subsistence practices. Based on these data, a detailed marine food web was constructed, which provides insight into local ecological conditions. We present a simple method for quantifying the trophic level of ancient fauna using d15N of bone collagen. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study for the reconstruction of human diet.

We introduce an innovative value- and ecosystem-based management approach (VEBMA) that exposes resource policy tradeoffs, fosters good governance, and can help to resolve conflicts. We apply VEBMA to the Pacific herring Clupea pallasii fishery in British Columbia, Canada, which is mired in conflict between local and indigenous communities and the fishing industry over the management of herring, a forage fish with significant socioeconomic, ecological, and cultural value. VEBMA integrates an ecosystem-based approach (ecological modelling) with a value-based approach (practical ethics) to examine the ecological viability, economic feasibility, and societal desirability of alternative fishery management scenarios. In the ecosystem-based approach, we applied the Management Strategy Evaluation module within the Ecopath with Ecosim modelling framework to explore scenarios with harvest-control rules specified by various herring fishing mortalities and biomass cutoff thresholds. In the value-based approach, Haida Gwaii community and herring industry participants ranked a set of values and selected preferred scenarios and cutoff thresholds. The modelled ecological impacts and risks and stakeholder preferences of the scenarios are synthesized in a deliberation and decision-support tool, the VEBMA science-policy table. VEBMA aims to facilitate inclusive, transparent, and accountable decision-making among diverse stakeholders, such as local communities, industries, scientists, managers, and policy-makers. It promotes compromise, rather than consensus solutions to resolve ‘wicked’ problems at the science-policy interface.

Cannon and Yang (2006) argue that a sedentary winter village based on stored pink and chum salmon began at Namu approximately 7000 B.P. In contrast, we argue that (a) available data support neither a sedentary winter village by that date nor a subsistence focus on stored pink and chum salmon; (b) the timing and ubiquity of salmon exploitation and storage was not as the authors assert; instead, stable, long-term adaptations focused on taxa other than salmon are found elsewhere on the Northwest Coast; and (c) seasonality estimation based on growth increments is a valid methodology.

The geologically ancient tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina rests precariously atop millions of years of erosion from the nearby Appalachian Mountains. An immense wetland at near sea level, it is host to every conceivable body of fresh water, ranging from brooding swamps and large hidden lakes to sluggish blackwater rivers and brackish sounds (one of which was so large an early explorer thought he had found the Pacific Ocean). In this engaging book, biologist and tidewater native Roy T Sawyer delivers an ecohistory of this unique waterland whose wind-driven tides cover a rich human and natural past.
    Jutting prominently into the Atlantic, this wetland is the final stop for the warmth of the Gulf Stream before it is deflected from the American mainland. At the top of a narrow, warm coastal strip, it provides an ideal home for a vast array of animal and plant life, including prodigious numbers of reptiles (such as the world's northernmost population of alligators) and overwntering waterfowl. It is also home to the oldest known living trees east of the Rocky Mountains. The climate and geography made the area a natural choice for the very early human habitation--- as far back as the last ice age, when the region was a rich oasis just south of a veritable  tundra.
    In examining the impact  of humans upon the environment, and vice-versa, Sawyer reveals how our alarming shortsightedness has produced a fragile and endangered present. Although human manipulation started here as early as ten thousand years ago (co-inciding with extinction of mammoths and other megafauna), the environment has been altered most radically over the last on hundred years, particularly in regard to land drainage, deforestation, overfishing, and pollution.
    The author provides an authoritative overview of the human impact on these wetlands and suggests ways in which we might still salvage them. In so doing, he explores the effects of hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and ice ages of the past--- an anticipates, in this age of global warming, natural events that may be still to come.

Herring plays an important role not only in the economy and gastronomy, but also in many other aspects of human culture. It is worth asking, in which socio-cultural contexts it appears and with what is it associated? In this regard, one can consider, inter alia, its cultural connotation – features identified by name, creating the content, meaning and a layer of associative words in a given language or culture. Important domain for this kind of study would be belles-lettres, as well as scientific literature. This text aims to identify and show the socio-cultural contexts and connotations, in which herring appears in the literary output of writers and researchers from Szczecin. The author analyzes especially "The Book of Fishing Sayings and Aphorisms", collected and elaborated by Janusz Moczulski, West Pomeranian fisherman and writer.

Blueback Herring (Alosa aestivalis) populations throughout the East Coast have declined precipitously since the late 1980s and were listed as a Species of Concern in 2006 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Natural resource agencies are attempting to restore this species to viable and sustainable levels with fry stockings cultured in hatcheries. To evaluate the long-term contribution of stockings to populations, agencies need an accurate method to track these stocking efforts. Genetic parentage-based tagging is recognized as a feasible means of assessing hatchery contribution of stocked fish to rivers of interest. However, Blueback Herring lack a reliable set of genetic markers to conduct parentage-based tagging (PBT). To this end, we analyzed previously described microsatellites as well as new microsatellite markers identified through NextGeneration sequencing to create a suite of 14 Blueback Herring markers useful for PBT. The markers were successful in parentage analysis for Blueback Herring collected from the Chowan River, North Carolina. An additional challenge in the management of Blueback Herring is the ability to phenotypically distinguish Blueback Herring and the closely related Alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus). Furthermore, recent studies provide evidence that these two species, collectively referred to as river herring, may be hybridizing with one another in some systems. Microsatellite marker AsaC334, developed by Julian and Bartron (2007), can be utilized to discriminate between the two species, as well as to identify their F1 hybrids, thereby providing another genetic tool for hatchery management.

The geologically ancient tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina rests precariously atop millions of years of erosion from the nearby Appalachian Mountains. An immense wetland at near sea level, it is host to every conceivable body of fresh water, ranging from brooding swamps and large hidden lakes to sluggish blackwater rivers and brackish sounds (one of which was so large an early explorer thought he had found the Pacific Ocean). In this engaging book, biologist and tidewater native Roy T Sawyer delivers an ecohistory of this unique waterland whose wind-driven tides cover a rich human and natural past. Jutting prominently into the Atlantic, this wetland is the final stop for the warmth of the Gulf Stream before it is deflected from the American mainland. At the top of a narrow, warm coastal strip, it provides an ideal home for a vast array of animal and plant life, including prodigious numbers of reptiles (such as the world's northernmost popu...