Harnessing Ancient Shellfish Data for Modern Coastal Restoration: A Case Study from Tseshaht First Nation

Illustrations by Morgan Holder, and used from facets-2023–0128. Measurements on littleneck, butter, and horse clams for generating linear regression models to estimate dorsal shell length.

Coastal archaeological sites often contain abundant evidence of ancient shellfish use by Indigenous peoples.

Clamshells are widely occurring and can reflect past marine environments and harvesting practices but are infrequently used to inform coastal restoration efforts today.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Working in Indigenous territories in coastal British Columbia (BC), this article presents a simple measurement-based method to generate shell sizes (aka size-at-harvest data) from fragmentary shells for three clam species commonly found in Indigenous archaeological sites.

We apply this method to a 3000-year-old clamshell assemblage from a Tseshaht First Nation archaeological village site on western Vancouver Island to illustrate its utility and potential.

The accessibility of this measurement-based method represents an opportunity for research teams and initiatives to involve people from diverse and non-scientific backgrounds in generating data to better inform the restoration of coastal environments and contribute to revitalizing these ancient food systems.

Read the paper — Estimating size-at-harvest from Indigenous archaeological clamshell assemblages in Coastal British Columbia by: Dylan Hillis, Kristina M. Barclay, Erin Foster, Hannah M. Kobluk, Taylor Vollman, Anne K. Salomon, Chris T. Darimont, and Iain McKechnie.