Archaeological research on North America's northwest coast has produced evidence of aboriginal whale use spanning the past 4000 years. The Toquaht Archaeological Project, on the west coast of Canada's Vancouver Island, recovered numerous whale skeletal elements, many of which show butchering marks. This paper examines these elements from the points of view of element frequency, and of type and location of butchering marks. The examination of these marks reveals the portions into which the whales were cut, the sequence of butchering events, the kinds of tools used, and the frequency with which these elements were transported onto the site. These observations are compared with other archaeological data, especially from the Ozette site in neighbouring Washington state, and with ethnographic records. The importance of a variety of whale products, not just blubber and the oil rendered from it, is emphasized. Copyright
Cannon and Yang (2006) argue that a sedentary winter village based on stored pink and chum salmon began at Namu approximately 7000 B. P. In contrast, we argue that (a) available data support neither a sedentary winter village by that date nor a subsistence focus on stored pink and chum salmon; (b) the timing and ubiquity of salmon exploitation and storage was not as the authors assert; instead, stable, long-term adaptations focused on taxa other than salmon are found elsewhere on the Northwest Coast; and (c) seasonality estimation based on growth increments is a valid methodology.
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