Historical ecology has revolutionized our understanding of fisheries and cultural landscapes, demonstrating the value of historical data for evaluating the past, present, and future of Earth’s ecosystems. Despite several important studies, Indigenous fisheries generally receive less attention from scholars and managers than the 17th–20th century capitalist commercial fisheries that decimated many keystone species, including oysters. We investigate Indigenous oyster harvest through time in North America and Australia, placing these data in the context of sea level histories and historical catch records. Indigenous oyster fisheries were pervasive across space and through time, persisting for 5000–10,000 years or more. Oysters were likely managed and sometimes “farmed,” and are woven into broader cultural, ritual, and social traditions. Effective stewardship of oyster reefs and other marine fisheries around the world must center Indigenous histories and include Indigenous community members to co-develop more inclusive, just, and successful strategies for restoration, harvest, and management.

Younger Dryas and early Holocene Western Stemmed Tradition occupants of the northern Great Basin appear to have practiced a broad-based subsistence strategy including the consumption of a wide variety of small animal and plant resources. However, much of our evidence for human diet and land use during this period comes from dry cave and rockshelter sites where it can be challenging to distinguish plant and small animal remains deposited as a result of human versus nonhuman activity. This study presents new direct evidence for Younger Dryas and early Holocene human diet in the northern Great Basin through multiproxy analysis of nine human coprolites from the Paisley Caves, Oregon, USA. The evidence indicates that Western Stemmed Tradition occupants consumed plants, small mammals, fish, and insects, including direct evidence for consumption of whole rodents and several types of beetle. Occupation of the caves occurred during the summer and fall by individuals foraging on wetland, sagebrush grassland, and riparian ecological landscapes suggesting geographical and seasonal variability in land-use patterns during the Younger Dryas and early Holocene periods. This research suggests that Western Stemmed Tradition settlement patterns were seasonally centered on productive valley bottom lakes and wetlands but also included forays to a variety of ecological landscapes. The results highlight the importance of plant and small animal resources in the human diet during the terminal Pleistocene settlement of North America and contribute to debates about the process of the peopling of the Americas.

In America’s Far West, chipped stone crescents dating between approximately 12,000 to 8000 cal BP are often found associated with Western Stemmed Tradition points. Crescent function is debated, but scholars have suggested that they are closely associated with wetland habitats, an association that has never been systematically investigated. Using a geographic information system-based Euclidean distance analysis, we compared a sample of 100 geolocated crescent-bearing sites in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and California with reconstructed paleoshorelines. We confirmed a strong association of crescents with wetlands—94 of the 100 sites and approximately 99% of crescents themselves were located within 10 km of reconstructed paleoshorelines. Our results provide quantitative and region-wide support for a strong association of crescents with terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene wetland habitats. The diversity of aquatic habitats crescents are associated with, along with their morphology, suggests an association with faunal rather than plant resources, possibly birds of the Pacific Flyway.

This paper summarizes over a decade of collaborative eco-archaeological research along the central coast of California involving researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, tribal citizens from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and California Department of Parks and Recreation archaeologists. Our research employs remote sensing methods to document and assess cultural resources threatened by coastal erosion and geophysical methods to identify archaeological deposits, minimize impacts on sensitive cultural resources, and provide tribal and state collaborators with a suite of data to consider before proceeding with any form of invasive archaeological excavation. Our case study of recent eco-archaeological research developed to define the historical biogeography of threatened and endangered anadromous salmonids demonstrates how remote sensing technologies help identify dense archaeological deposits, remove barriers, and create bridges through equitable and inclusive research practices between archaeologists and the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. These experiences have resulted in the incorporation of remote sensing techniques as a central approach of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band when conducting archaeology in their traditional territories.