On the Role of Coastal Landscape Evolution in Detecting Fish Weirs: A Pacific Northwest Coast Example From Washington State

ABSTRACT

In North America's Pacific Northwest, archaeologists have extensively researched coastal fish weirs—one of several types of mass fish capture technologies used by precontact peoples—and their role in the development of delayed return economies and implications for social organization. Fish weirs, however, are typically situated in areas that are susceptible to a range of geomorphic and anthropogenic factors that affect their preservation and visibility. Given the importance of these capture facilities to understanding the histories of coastal peoples, a better understanding of these factors, and how they affect the archaeological record, is needed. Using the recently augmented coastal fish weir record in Washington State as a case study, we explore these factors by compiling an expanded database of 22 sites and 36 radiocarbon dates and systematically consider how coastal geomorphological processes operating along the Northwest Coast affect the age and distribution of fish weirs. Through this analysis, we argue that regional patterns in cultural use and taphonomy of the construction of fish weirs, as well as human responses to coastal dynamism, must be considered through the lens of geomorphic and anthropogenic factors that affect the coastal margin on a local and regional scale.

Keywords:

• coastal
• fishing
• geoarchaeology
• Northwest
• taphonomy formation processes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Kurt Perkins for his contribution as co-author a poster outlining an early version of the information presented in this article. Thank you to Paul Solimano and Patrick Reed for providing GIS and graphics support. We greatly appreciate the insights and information shared by Gary Wessen, Laura Phillips, Maurice Major, and Dale Croes. Thank you, too, to our anonymous reviewers for their comments and insights.

Notes

An additional fish capture site in Washington State is not included in our summary discussion: 45CL31, located on a backwater floodplain channel of the Columbia River, ∼160 km upriver from the mouth. The location and context suggests the facility was not an intertidal trap and hence not considered in our review (see Wessen [1983], for additional information).