Madonna L. Moss

University of Oregon | UO · Department of Anthropology

This paper presents the results of recent archaeological survey and zooarchaeological studies of five sites located on the Forrester Islands of southeast Alaska, part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Even though many Alaska Natives have a long history of hunting migratory birds—including...

Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean provides a wide-ranging survey of Pacific history to 1800. It focuses on varied concepts of the Pacific environment and its impact on human history, as well as tracing the early exploration and colonization of the Pacific, the evolution of Indigenous maritime cultures after colonization, and th...

Phenological diversity in food resources prolongs foraging opportunities for consumers and buffers them against environmental disturbances. Such diversity is particularly important in forage fish such as Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), which are foundational to coastal food webs and fisheries. While the importance of phenological diversity is we...

Approximately 100 rockfish species are found in the North Pacific Ocean (Orr and Hawkins 2008), and typically these can only be identified archaeologically to the genus level, Sebastes. Recent ancient DNA (aDNA) study of rockfish from Coffman Cove, Alaska, has identified eight rockfish species. Drawing from the life history and habitat preferences...

The timing of reproduction influences key evolutionary and ecological processes in wild populations. Variation in reproductive timing may be an especially important evolutionary driver in the marine environment, where the high mobility of many species and few physical barriers to migration provide limited opportunities for spatial divergence to ari...

Rice Ridge (49-KOD-363) is a deeply stratified archaeological site on Kodiak Island, Alaska, with well-preserved faunal remains from three occupations dating to the Ocean Bay tradition. The site contained an extensive bird-bone assemblage analyzed here for the first time. Casperson (2012) studied bird bones from Mink Island (49-XMK-030), also locat...

Genetic analyses are an important contribution to wildlife reintroductions, particularly in the modern context of extirpations and ecological destruction. To address the complex historical ecology of the sea otter ( Enhydra lutris ) and its failed 1970s reintroduction to coastal Oregon, we compared mitochondrial genomes of pre-extirpation Oregon se...

Birds have been an integral part of traditional Yup'ik lifeways in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, southwest Alaska, both economically and symbolically. From a subsistence point of view, the rich ethnographic record for the region highlights the importance of this resource as a critical seasonal food and a source of raw materials for clothing and tools....

Paper is open access at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416520300726 Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) occur in the archaeological record throughout North America but few zooarchaeo- logical studies have examined the extent of wild and domestic canids using multi-site observations across regions. Here, we present a meta-anal...

The maritime fur trade caused the extirpation of sea otters from southeast Alaska. In the 1960s, sea otters were reintroduced, and their numbers have increased. Now, sea otters are competing with people for what have become commercially important invertebrates. After having been absent for more than a century, the reentry of this keystone species h...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Birds have been an integral part of traditional Yup’ik lifeways in the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, southwest Alaska, both economically and symbolically. From a subsistence point of view, the rich ethnographic record for the region highlights the importance of this resource as a critical seasonal food and a source of raw materials for clothing and tools....

Wild specimens are often collected in challenging field conditions, where samples may be contaminated with the DNA of conspecific individuals. This contamination can result in false genotype calls, which are difficult to detect, but may also cause inaccurate estimates of heterozygosity, allele frequencies, and genetic differentiation. Marine broadc...

Native American use of birds on the Oregon coast is not well known and has never been synthesized to present a regional understanding. We rectify this by analyzing data from 26 zooarchaeological assemblages, including three previously unpublished bird assemblages: Umpqua/Eden (35DO83), Whale Cove (35LNC60), and the Dunes Site (35CLT27). We employ a...

Fisheries are of fundamental importance to Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America today and in the past but few archaeological analyses have documented geographic patterning in fisheries across the entire region. This paper adopts meta-analysis methods and GIS-based spatial visualizations to survey the single largest compilati...

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Long-term use of herring by Alaska Natives is not well-documented over space or through time, yet this information can illuminate pre-industrial patterns of herring abundance and distribution. Such information is important to understand the sustained relationships Alaska Native fishers and egg collectors have had with herring. Understanding the gen...

The perspective of nutritional ecology produces a more comprehensive understanding of the dietary, economic, and socio-cultural importance of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) to Northwest Coast societies and Alaska Natives than do models derived from optimal foraging theory. The food value of herring meat, eggs, and oil are found to rank highly no...

supporting materials for the paper: McKechnie I, Lepofsky D, Moss ML, Butler VL, Orchard TJ, Coupland G, Foster F, Caldwell M, Lertzman K. 2014. Archaeological data provide alternative hypotheses on Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) distribution, abundance, and variability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 111: E807–E816 https:/...

Significance Over the last century, Pacific herring, a forage fish of tremendous cultural, economic, and ecological importance, has declined in abundance over much of its range. We synthesize archaeological fisheries data spanning the past 10,000 y from Puget Sound in Washington to southeast Alaska to extend the ecological baseline for herring and...

Salmonid bones are common in North Pacific archaeological sites, but the inability to identify salmon vertebrae to the species level has limited the range of anthropological questions that can be addressed through their study. Although DNA recovered from ancient salmonid remains can be analyzed to identify species, relatively few investigators have...

California and Great Basin archaeologists have long discussed and debated the function of chipped stone crescents found in Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites in the Far West of North America. Because they are found over a vast area, in sites occupied over a period spanning at least 4,000 years (~12,000–8,000 cal BP), it may be that cresc...

The Oxford History of Wetland Archaeology is a comprehensive survey of global wetland archaeology. Well known for the spectacular quality of its surviving evidence, from both an archaeological and environmental perspective, wetland archaeology enables scholars to investigate and reconstruct past people's dwellings, landscapes, material culture, and...

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasi) are an abundant and important component of the coastal ecosystems for the west coast of North America. Current Canadian federal herring management assumes five regional herring populations in British Columbia with a high degree of exchange between units, and few distinct local populations within them. Indigenous tra...

Modern and ancient herring haplotype (h) and nucleotide (π) diversities [92] based on 350 bp mtDNA D-loop fragment. (DOCX)

Modern and ancient herring haplotype (h) and nucleotide (π) diversities [92] based on 235 bp mtDNA cytb fragment. (DOCX)

Modern and ancient herring SNP genotypes. (DOCX)

Individual herring vertebra weighing less than 10 mg. (TIF)

Phylogenetic tree of cytb haplotypes. Bayesian (Monte Carlo–Markov chain) consensus tree displaying the relationships between the obtained cytb sequences and modern Clupea Genbank reference sequences (accession numbers listed), with Pacific anchovy (Cetengraulis mysticetus) as the outgroup. Posterior probabilities of the major nodes are listed for...

Reporter sequence and primers for SNP assay. (DOCX)

Example of Cpa_11961_c04 TaqMan SNP assay results. Allelic discrimination plots for a) modern herring extracts, and b) ancient herring extracts. Samples called using the autocaller function of the StepOneTM Software v2.0 are indicated by either red (GG), green (GT) or blue (TT) circles. The squares indicate the NTC’s and the X’s indicate samples wi...

Cytochrome b and D-loop haplotype of the analyzed archaeological herring bones. (DOCX)

Cytb and D-loop Clupea mtDNA PCR amplification primers. (DOCX)

Microsatellite analyses. (DOCX)

On the Northwest Coast of North America, animal resource intensification is central to many explanations for increasing cultural complexity. In this article, I show that such arguments are often decoupled from specific ecological contexts. Much of the variability in faunal assemblages can be explained by the spatial and temporal distribution of ani...

Over the last twenty-five years, archaeologists have compiled a substantial zooarchaeological record of pinnipeds on the Washington, Oregon, and California coasts. Archaeological studies have also shown that patterns of pinniped species abundance and distribution in the late twentieth century do not necessarily reflect conditions in the ancient pas...

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Three archaeological sites on California’s Channel Islands show that Paleoindians relied heavily on marine resources. The Paleocoastal sites, dated between ~12,200 and 11,200 years ago, contain numerous stemmed projectile points and crescents associated with a variety of marine and aquatic faunal remains. At site CA-SRI-512 on Santa Rosa Island, Pa...

A synthesis of the frequency and distribution of herring bones across Southeast Alaskan archaeological sites. This analysis also considers archaeological sampling factors that affect one's ability to perceive herring bones and how these factors relate to the known distribution of herring bones across archaeological sites.

a b s t r a c t Although the dietary importance of barnacles is recognized in Europe and elsewhere around the world, indigenous use of barnacles on the Pacific coast of North America has not been well-documented. On the Northwest Coast, most shell middens located along estuaries are dominated by clams (such as Saxidomus, Protothaca, etc.), while th...

Archeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistorical data provide ambiguous evidence of the dietary and economic importance of shellfish in Northwest Coast cultures. In the case of the Tlingit, I find that understanding shellfish from an emic perspective is critical to reconciling these equivocal data on economic importance. The Tlingit associated shel...

Ce article décrit les résultats d'une enquête archéologique récente ainsi que ceux tirés d'études zoo-archéologiques de cinq sites situés sur les Îles Forrester au sud-est de l'Alaska. Les Îles Forrester font maintenant partie du Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge géré par le U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Bien que de nombreux habitants orig...

A variety of evidence suggests that the Americas may have been colonized, at least in part, by maritime peoples moving around the North Pacific Rim near the end of the Pleistocene. Understanding the geography of late glacial and early postglacial landscapes and the antiquity of human societies along the Pacific Coast continues to be a challenge, ho...

Haida Gwaii is the most remote island archipelago of the Northwest Coast of North America. During the AD 1700s, the Kaigani Haida migrated from their homeland on Haida Gwaii north to the Prince of Wales Archipelago by canoeing across the open waters of Dixon Entrance. Since First Nations people have lived in this region for over 10,000 years, earli...

Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. Richard Nelson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 389 pp.

Langdon (1979) characterized Tlingit and Kaigani Haida resource orientations in southeast Alaska as significantly different from one another. He argued that the Kaigani were better adapted to open, offshore waters and focused on halibut, bottomfish, and dog salmon, selecting their villages near good halibut or cod fishing banks. In contrast, the Tl...

:Until 2003, it was illegal to hunt migratory birds in Alaska during the spring and summer. Even though many Alaska Natives have a long history of hunting migratory birds, use of these resources is not well documented. Here we present our preliminary analyses of the bird remains recovered from the Deering Archaeological District (49-KTZ-169), locat...

This chapter reviews the cultural dynamics as a result of climatic changes in the Northwest Coast of North America. It reviews the paleoclimatic and archaeological records of this region to establish possible causal relationships between them. It suggests that on the Northwest Coast of North America, the middle Holocene was a time of changing clima...

Protecting archaeological sites from intentional destruction requires an understanding of the dimensions of the problem. In this study, the proportion of archaeological sites in Alaska that have been looted or vandalized was quantified and statistically compared to factors thought to contribute to these activities. Three factors were significantly...

Zooarchaeology has the potential to make significant contributions to knowledge of pinniped biogeography of import to both archaeologists and environmental scientists. We analyzed northern fur seal remains found in three archaeological sites located along the outer coast of the Northeast Pacific Ocean: Cape Addington Rockshelter in southeast Alaska...

In the journal Radiocarbon , Hall et al. (2005:383) claim that 35-CS-9, located in Bandon Ocean Wayside State Park on the southern Oregon coast, is one of the few Oregon coast sites “that includes sediments and artifacts dating to the early Holocene and possibly to the late Pleistocene.” Their claim for an early Holocene or late Pleistocene human o...

:Frederica de Laguna has influenced the research goals and career trajectories of many anthropologists working in the north. We are two who have worked in southeast Alaska, a region typically studied as part of the Northwest Coast culture area. In addition to numerous articles on the Northwest Coast, de Laguna authored, co-authored and/or edited fo...

Recent papers by Michelle Hegmon (2003) and Joe Watkins (2003) purport to "map the terrain" of North American archaeology. Yet these two metaphorical maps present very different views of the contours of North American archaeology. Taken together, the two papers highlight problematic divisions between (1) theory and practice in North American archae...

Due to its geographic position at the extreme northernmost end of the Northwest Coast, Tlingit territory has the lowest diversity of terrestrial plant resources of any subregion of the culture area. While ethnographers have listed culturally important plants and recorded some gathering methods, the economic and dietary importance of plants in Tling...

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:Southeast Alaska is bounded by British Columbia and Yukon Territory, and most of the region is Tlingit territory. Haida, Tsimshian, and Athapaskans have all played roles in the region's long-term history. Contemporary political boundaries structure current archaeological work because the United States and Canada have different academic traditions,...

The skeletal remains of 17 people buried in the Eaton Ferry Cemetery in northern North Carolina provide a means of examining health and infectious disease experience in the XIX century South. The cemetery appears to contain the remains of African Americans enslaved on the Eaton family estate from approximately 1830-1850, and thus offers a window in...