While earning bachelor's and master's degrees at California State University, Chico, he studied bones from archaeological sites in California's Sacramento Valley and began to recognize that early natives had a strong impact on elk, deer, and sturgeon - "anything big and juicy," he says.įor his doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington, Broughton analyzed fish and mammal bones taken from the Emeryville shellmound, an ancient Indian site on the east shore of San Francisco Bay between Oakland and Berkeley.Ībout 2,600 years ago, California's native people started living on the site and using it to dump residential waste such as shellfish remnants, bones, soil, rocks, ash and charcoal, and artifacts such as stone tools. Himself a product of sunny California, Broughton grew up in rural Camarillo in the southern part of the state, "collecting butterflies, watching birds, and skinning skunks." The dream world of Disneyland, the glamour and glimmer of Hollywood, the Baywatch fun-in-the-sun culture - all of this may trace a link to early historic descriptions of the land that now appear to be worlds apart from pre-European conditions." Broughton speculates that "utopian perceptions" of a pristine California teeming with wildlife "probably even influence how Californians view themselves, and how the world views the Golden State. Depending on when and where you look back in time, native peoples were either living in harmony with nature or eating their way through a vast array of large-sized, attractive prey species." The harvesting methods and strategies of native peoples have been suggested to have promoted the apparent superabundance of wildlife, and have been proposed as models for the management of wilderness areas and national parks today."īroughton says his study challenges "a common perception about ancient Native Americans as healthy, happy people living in harmony with the environment. "This perception has long colored anthropological research on the state's native peoples. "Since European discovery, California has been viewed by scholars and scientists, as well as the general public - as a kind of utopia or a land of milk and honey, a super-rich natural environment," he says. Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to local extinction, and wildlife returned to "fabulous abundances" only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s.īroughton's study of bird bones, published in Ornithological Monographs, mirrors earlier research in which he found that fish such as sturgeon, mammals such as elk, and other wildlife also sustained significant population declines at the hands of ancient Indian hunters.īiologists long assumed that the abundant wildlife in California some 200 years ago had existed for thousands of years - an assumption "that is ultimately used to make decisions about how to manage and conserve threatened or endangered species," says Broughton, an associate professor of anthropology. He determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn't possible, at least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years.īroughton concluded that California wasn't always a lush Eden before settlers arrived. Broughton spent seven years - from 1997 to 2004 - painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Since then, people assumed such faunal wealth represented California's natural condition - a product of Native Americans' living in harmony with the wildlife and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern environmental damage. When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early 1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer, marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered.
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