Sea Urchin and Indigenous Marine Resource Management in the Archaeological Record: Implications for Sea Otter Conservation in Coastal British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ancient remains of sea urchins are frequently encountered in archaeological contexts along the Northwest Coast of North America, yet they have not been the focus of synergetic archaeological study. However, these important marine species are important for providing new insights into the deep time of Indigenous marine resource management systems. Motivated in part by current ecological research identifying the importance of sea urchin body size for influencing the range and productivity of kelp forests on the Pacific coast and the importance of urchins as a size selective preferred prey for sea otters (Enhydra lutris) this project involved developing a quantitative methodology to evaluate red sea urchin (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) size variation in the archaeological record based on linear regression. This method was developed to investigate the prevalence of sea otters in the Barkley Sound region from archaeological data to inform contemporary sea otter conservation in coastal British Columbia – a widespread concern across several First Nations’ traditional territories today. Specifically, this paper investigates whether urchins of large size are regularly present in archaeological samples from the Broken Group and Deer Group Islands to lend support to the hypothesis that Coastal First Nations actively managed sea otters by excluding them from urchin harvesting areas. This research contributes to the greater socio-cultural context of Coastal First Nations interaction with their marine environments as active participants rather than passive foragers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".