Ancestral sea gardens supported human settlements for at least 3,800 years on the Northwest Coast of North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationships between clam gardens and human settlement throughout the millennia reflects the inseparable links among human demographics, marine management systems, and the social-ecological contexts in which they are embedded. However, it can be difficult to assign causation between the initiation and development of eco-cultural innovations like clam gardens and the proliferation of human societies due to the temporal uncertainties associated with both. Here, we bring together data on the shape of the local relative sea level curve, clam garden wall elevation as determined by GIS and drone imagery, radiocarbon dates of clam garden walls, and ecological and archaeological field observations, to assign proxy ages for the clam garden walls of different tidal heights in Kanish and Waiatt Bay on northern Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada. These data, combined with our mapping and dating of settlement sites, demonstrate a temporal relationship between clam garden building effort and the densification of human settlements. In Kanish Bay, where we have high resolution data, clam gardens begin to be constructed in significant numbers at least 3,800 years ago; this corresponds to a time of increased establishment of large human settlements. The corresponding increase in settlements and clam gardens reflects both the need to increase sustainable food production and the larger number of people who could sustain the ecological and social foundations of the production system. The correlation between number and area of clam gardens and the number of new, large settlements continues until ∼2000 years ago. After this time, existing settlements increase in size, but no additional large settlements were established. New clam gardens continue to be built but in seemingly lower numbers. This shift in settlements and clam gardens suggest that a threshold in social-ecological carrying capacity may have been reached in this land- and seascape. In the last few centuries, there is a dramatic decline in the number of clam gardens and evidence of human settlement, corresponding to social and ecological changes associated with European colonization. Taken together, these data demonstrate the strong linkages among Indigenous peoples, their lands and seas, and resilient food systems over the millennia.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".