Most human societies are ecologically complex, in the sense that they derive their nutrients and energy from a variety of ecosystems. Even "simple" hunting and gathering peoples travel over considerable distances to exploit diverse habitats and trade with other societies. The organization of human activity is therefore one way that nutrients, energy, and non-human species are redistributed, and different human cultures represent different patterns of resource redistribution. Because humans have been part of most ecosystems for a long time, most ecosystems that regarded today as "pristine" or "natural" are, to some degree, artifacts of human cultures. The research development project focuses on the role of indigenous Pacific Northwest Coast Salish cultures in the pre-industrial structure of Salish Sea (Puget Sound-Georgia Strait) ecosystems, with special emphasis placed on exploring the extent to which Coast Salish peoples provided connectivity between different terrestrial and marine habitats. As an early part of what is anticipated to be a much wider-ranging inquiry that explored between 75 and 100 sites in the archipelago of islands dispersed across Puget Sound and Georgia Strait, the project will glean evidence of a single human-ecological process (the impact of burning in upland areas in ways that had ecologically significant, relevant effects on nearshore marine habitats) from one site in the San Juan Islands that offers a record at least 500 years long. A team of young investigators working with both Native and non-Native students will conduct field work to ascertain late prehistoric fire regime in the study site watershed, reproduce and evaluate stuydy site's prehistoric fire regime, and seek to confirm fire regime effects from sediment paleofauna. The work will rely on a range of archaeological and paleoenvironmental research techniques, including habitat mapping, examination of witness trees, analysis of sediment and shell-midden cores, and test-plot burning.
Although anticipated to be only an early step in a long-duration research program that will expand to examine other sites and other forms of human-natural system interaction, this developmental project still should provide some significant new information and perspectives. The project is expected to provide a rigorous test of a hypothesis relating to the prehistoric human effects on aquatic environments. It also should test and refine a suite of tools for exploring prehistoric human-related fire as well as other prehistoric resource-management regimes. In terms of broader impacts, the project should initiate efforts to assemble a large collection of dated faunal remains and sediments from cultural and natural deposits, thereby preserving paleoecological data that otherwise would be lost. Reconstructing the long-term resilience of Puget Sound marine ecosystems to human and geophysical (climate, sea level, seismic) impacts is expected to strengthen science-based predictive capabilities for decision making in the basin, where extremely costly measures have been launched to defend vulnerable or endangered species such as Pacific salmon stocks and where efforts are currently underway to establish an international marine protected area. The project also should build long-term research relationships among U.S. and Canadian universities and marine-dependent Native American communities, and it should recruit a corps of Native and non-Native science students to collaborate in its design and evolve into a culturally diverse multidisciplinary team. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2003 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.
