Originally presented as Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Originally presented as Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

No description available.

Several archaeological examinations have taken place at site 35CS43 in the modern town of Bandon, on Oregon's southern coast. The site has proven to be complex, including evidence of past use as both a cemetery and living site with specialized areas for the harvest and processing of estuarine resources. The site includes huge quantities of shell found in concentrated refuse heaps or middens. Samples of this shell have been taken over the course of excavations and stored for later consideration and analysis, the results of which should lend to greater theory concerning aboriginal subsistence and culture of the occupants of the lower Coquille river estuary. In this analysis of shell material from 35CS43, several previous shell analyses on the Oregon coast are summarized. A shell sample drawn in 1990 is then quantified and analyzed. Finally, information presented is formulated into a model for future excavations and shell analyses. To understand the shore it is not enough to catalogue its life. Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculpted its land forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shore blindly pick up an empty shell and say 'This is a murex.' or 'That is an angel wing.'. True understanding demands intuitive comprehension of the whole life of the creature that once inhabited this empty shell: how it survived amid surf and storms, what were its enemies; how it found food and reproduced its kind, what were its relations to the particular sea world in which it lived. / Graduation date: 1994

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1994. / Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, 1994. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

This thesis explores phosphate as an indicator of occupational intensity (i.e. as a function of scale and length of occupation) at shell midden sites on the central coast of British Columbia. Despite the prevalence of shell middens in coastal environments world-wide and the long history of elemental analysis in archaeology, shell middens are not routinely investigated for their chemical content. Ongoing research on the British Columbia central coast has shown clear associations between fish bone densities (NISP/L) and site area (m2), which have proven useful for characterizing variability among settlements in the region. This provided the opportunity and essential basis for investigating phosphate. Due to its general abundance, persistence, and established association with human activity, phosphate was expected to reflect previously inferred patterns in occupational intensity, which were based on fish bone density and site area data. Results show clear relationships between phosphate values, fish bone densities, and site area, which speaks to the utility of phosphate as an independent indicator of the relative intensity of residential activity among sites. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis sets out to examine issues of selectivity and availability in fishing and shellfish gathering by pre-European Maori at Triangle Flat in western Golden Bay. Faunal remains from four archaeological sites have revealed new and valuable information about economic subsistence practices in this region. It is proposed that exploitation of these important coastal resources was based on factors other than the availability of, proximity to resource patches. Evidence from the Triangle Flat sites is compared to that from Tasman Bay and the southern North Island to gain a regional perspective on fishing and shellfish gathering strategies. The most definitive evidence for selective targeting is provided by tuatua, an open beach species that has been found to dominate in sites based adjacent to tidal mud and sand flats. Also of interest is the dominance of mud snail in a site that is adjacent to large cockle and pipi beds. When regional sites were examined it was found that this pattern was also recorded for the site of Appleby in Tasman Bay. Selectivity in fishing strategies is also apparent with red cod and barracouta dominating the Triangle Flat assemblages. This pattern conforms to evidence from both eastern Golden Bay and Tasman Bay but does not reflect evidence from the southern North Island. Of particular interest is the apparent dearth of snapper in the sites at Triangle Flat, since snapper abounds in the area today. An explanation based on climatic change is considered to be the most feasible. This indicates that enviromentalal availability was at least in part responsible for the archaeological evidence of fishing. The consistency of the catch of red cod and barracouta in Golden Bay, and the pattern of shellfishing preferentially for tuatua suggests that cultural choice was also a significant selective factor.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Dept. of Archaeology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

No description available.

During the Late Woodland Period in the American Southeast, the amount of space that any individual group could exploit began to shrink, due to the presence of other groups on the landscape. Resource expansion occurred to augment food supplies, resulting in increased exploitation of mussel beds. Because mussels can be extremely sensitive to the characteristics of the waterways they live in, the specific habitat requirements of these animals can be used to reconstruct the environments they were recovered from. In this thesis I use freshwater mussel assemblages to reconstruct hypothetical aquatic catchments and map them onto modern rivers in the Yazoo River Basin and the Tombigbee River Basin. These are used to test ethnographic models of exploited space. I also use detrended correspondence analysis to test if sites exist in mathematical space like they do in physical space along the Yazoo River basin, as observed in the Tombigbee River basin.