Evidence of Changing Climate and Subsistence Strategies Among the Nuu-chah-nulth of Canada’s West Coast

Monks, Gregory G.

doi:10.1007/978-94-024-1106-5_10

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…These findings are supported by detrended data from marine sediment cores which shows similar increases in two different regions of the northeast Pacific (Praetorius et al 2015 ). Additionally, geochemical analysis of sediment cores from southwestern Yukon (Anderson et al 2007 ), faunal records preserved in marine sediments in Barkley Sound (Wright et al 2005 ), and geochemical analysis of archaeologically recovered fish bones from Barkley Sound (Monks 2017 ) reflect a similar shift in climate throughout the mid and late-Holocene. By integrating zooarchaeological and geochemical data, we provide multiple lines of evidence that document broad ocean warming in the northeast Pacific over the past five millennia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A palaeothermometer of ancient Indigenous fisheries reveals increases in mean temperature of the catch over five millennia

et al. 2022

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Climate change is altering the distribution and composition of marine fish populations globally, which presents substantial risks to the social and economic well-being of humanity. While deriving long-term climatic baselines is an essential step for detecting and attributing the magnitude of climate change and its impacts, these baselines tend to be limited to historical datasets and palaeoecological sediment records. Here, we develop a method for estimating the ‘ancient Mean Temperature of the Catch’ (aMTC) using Indigenous fisheries catch records from two archaeological sites in the northeast Pacific. Despite different catch compositions, we observe an increase in aMTC over a 5,000-year period at two contemporaneously occupied archaeological sites in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. We document cooler catches from 5,000 to 3,000 cal yr BP and comparatively warmer catches from 1,800 to 250 cal yr BP. These warmer temperatures are broadly consistent with palaeoceanographic sea surface temperature proxies from British Columbia and Alaska. Because this method requires converting measures of fish bones into estimates of fish size structure, abundance, biomass, and finally aMTC, opportunities exist to account for both variation and uncertainty at every step. Nevertheless, given that preindustrial fisheries data are ubiquitous in coastal archaeological sites, this method has the potential to be applied globally to broaden the temporal and geographic scale of ocean temperature baselines.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%