[OR_Archaeology] Director of OMNCH, OR Archaeologist cited in the New York Times

[Susan White]

Ancient Man Hurt Coasts 
By CORNELIA DEAN
The New York Times
Published: August 20, 2009 

The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the
landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age
humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the
mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists
are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science,
anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of
Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants
along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of
Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the
researchers do fieldwork.

“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben
C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the
Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with
fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine
ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.

And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal
landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development,
efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail. 

Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon,
said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago
left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues
to how they altered their landscape.

“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson
said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became
abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In
turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests
of kelp on which they fed. 

“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.

Today, coastal scientists argue about a similar cascade, which some
attribute to sea otters’ being eaten by killer whales. 

But not all the effects of early inhabitants were negative, the
scientists say, adding that when people in the Channel Islands hunted
otters, they probably ended up increasing the abundance of shellfish.
The researchers also cite systems of walls and terraces that people in
the Pacific Northwest built to trap sediment and create habitat for
clams, which they harvested and ate.

Dr. Erlandson said anthropologists in general were not used to thinking
that people exploited marine environments before 4,000 or so years ago,
when sea levels that had been rising since the end of the last ice age
more or less stabilized. Much of the evidence of earlier coastal
settlements has vanished under the waves, he said.

And in places where such evidence remains, it is not always recognized
for what it is, he said. “Anthropologists walked past those clam
gardens for years without recognizing them,” he said. He said it was a
coastal geologist who first exclaimed, “Wow, those aren’t
natural!” 

Sea levels are on the rise today, fueled by global warming, and Dr.
Rick said anthropologists were rushing to excavate the most threatened
coastal sites. 

“This archaeological record is really important for helping us
understand contemporary issues,” he said. “It’s a threatened
resource.”