Cod Before Salmon: A 3,500-Year-Old Fishery on the Katmai Coast

Over 20,000 soot-covered fish bones and fragments came out of an excavation of only 6.5 square feet (2 m2) on Little Takli Island, Alaska, in a layer packed to roughly 16 inches (40 cm) thick. Most were Pacific cod. Only 154 were salmon. That is the starting point of an Alaska Park Science article by Rhea Hood of the National Park Service, who analyzed the bones and argues that the people who left them fished the open sea for cod long before the salmon surplus that came later.

Amalik Bay and archeological excavation units at the Little Takli Island site in 2009 (NPS/L. Barton).

The site

The Little Takli Island site (XMK-031) is one of 28 pre-contact archeological sites in the Amalik Bay Archeological District National Historic Landmark, part of Katmai National Park and Preserve, and one of only four in the landmark examined in detail. National Park Service archeologists and academic colleagues are salvaging what data they can from a handful of the most endangered sites as stone and bone artifacts erode into the sea; their research reaches back well over 6,000 years. Much of the Little Takli refuse pile has already eroded into the bay as sea level has risen, and the rest is unexcavated. The site has two layers of artifacts: the first dates to 3,570 calibrated years before present (cal BP, 1620 BC) and the second to 1,010 cal BP (AD 940). The island is over half a mile (1 km) long and has three other archeological sites on it. The site yielded almost no fishing tools among all the fish bones.

What the bones say

Hood identified the bones by comparing them with modern fish skeletons.

Fish were 75% of all animal bones at the site (20,794 bones). Pacific cod accounted for 7,790 of them, with just 108 walleye pollock; setting aside the fragments that could not be identified, Pacific cod were 51.46% of the fish. With far smaller numbers of many other animals, that makes Pacific cod the main food of the people at the site, Hood concludes.

• Cod size. Using formulas built from measurements of modern Pacific cod, Hood estimated length and weight from head bones. The average cod was 28 inches (71 cm) long, over three years old and mature. The largest was 39 inches (99 cm) and 27 pounds (12 kg). Mature Pacific cod come nearshore from late winter to early spring and by mid-summer move to deeper water. In a 2000 study of Atlantic cod caught on hook and line, 90% were between 22 and 33 inches (56 to 84 cm); at Little Takli, 86% were between 24 and 35 inches (61 to 89 cm), a strikingly similar spread.
• Halibut. Nearly 6% of the bones were flatfish. Many came from smaller nearshore species, such as flathead sole (19 bones), butter sole (17) and northern rock sole (135), but almost half were Pacific halibut (590), much larger than the other fish and probably from water around 980 feet (300 m) deep in Shelikof Strait.
• Open-sea fishing. From the size of the cod and halibut, Hood infers that people regularly traveled far from the coast by boat to fish deep water 3,500 years ago.
• Other fish. The pollock (108 bones), greenlings and spiny dogfish are rare, the last two under 1% each, and live where cod do in spring and summer, so they were probably bycatch, bait, or swallowed by larger prey. Sculpins, the second most common fish at 9.32%, were mostly red or yellow Irish Lord and live in rocky tidepools, which calls for different tools. Salmon bones are soft and, after spawning, softer still, so mostly vertebrae survive; the low count is evidence that salmon were bycatch, arrived in the stomachs of larger prey, or were only occasionally targeted.

A composite fishhook shank carved from bone from the Little Takli Island site (NPS/R. Hood).

What the fishers used

Evidence of tackle is sparse, since lines rot and bone hooks wear away. Excavation turned up one composite bone fishhook shank and a handful of large plummet-style weights sculpted from cobblestones. Traditional Alaskan methods for cod, flatfish and sculpins put hooks along a single hand-thrown line or along a horizontal bar on the line, with plummets fastened at key points. In the Pacific Northwest, such stones hold a halibut line in the water so the hooks hang just a few inches above the seafloor, and Hood suggests the plummets could also have served for bottom-dwelling sculpins, rockfishes and small flatfishes.

Other sites tell the same story

Comparing three other sites, Hood asked whether Little Takli was a fluke. At the Mink Island site, 109 yards (100 m) away, a doctoral student's study found many of the same species; both islands were probably once part of a larger island before rising seas split them. Mink Island was used from 6,300 to 4,000 cal BP and again from 2,000 to 500 cal BP, and Little Takli's early occupation ran from 3,570 to 3,370 cal BP, so together they span several archeological traditions:

During the Ocean Bay period sea mammals hunted nearshore were the main protein, with sculpins, small flatfishes and smaller Pacific cod from the same waters. As the Kachemak tradition progressed, Pacific cod bones rose markedly as sea-mammal hunting fell, peaking in the Early Kachemak; cod were then gradually replaced by more salmon and sculpin, and salmon use kept growing in the Koniag period that followed. Hood says the changes in the size and number of cod may reflect environmental change or different fishing methods. At the Rice Ridge site on Kodiak Island, used from 6,000 to 3,900 cal BP, cod harvesting rose around the same time. At Horseshoe Cove, also in the Kodiak Islands, cod dominated the bones from a 3,850 to 3,400 cal BP occupation, and archeologists found large cobble-lined fire pits filled with charcoal that they wonder were earth ovens for smoking fish.

Hood notes there are no clear-cut answers about events so long ago, but the bones from sites around the Gulf of Alaska show a sea-mammal hunting tradition among the people who settled the region more than 7,000 years ago, with a gradual turn to Pacific cod. Cod seemed to peak in the Early Kachemak, before the Late Kachemak and Koniag traditions, the period known for developing the salmon-surplus traditions.

Sources

• National Park Service, Alaska Park Science 19(1), Zooarcheology of a 3,500-year-old Fishery on the Katmai Coast, by Rhea Hood, National Park Service (2020); rewritten in hubnx's own words.