WEBVTT

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[Megan Caldwell]:I'm working with SLIAM and First Nation to research the ancient marine resource use and management in their territory.

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[Megan Caldwell]:So I've been looking at fish traps and modified clam beds throughout the territory and in addition to that I'm excavating at a number of sites to get the shellfish and fish remains from the territory.

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[Megan Caldwell]:So to get those herring, I excavate samples and I screen them through fine mesh screens, two millimeter mesh screens, so that we can get those small herring bones.

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[Megan Caldwell]:So this is a series of samples taken from a site at Myrtle Rocks in Sliamon Territory from a 50 centimeter by 50 centimeter unit that we excavated this summer just before a house went in.

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[Megan Caldwell]:And so today I'm sorting through one of those samples and picking out the herring bones from that sample to quantify, to look at them to see how many bones there are and what people were eating in the past.

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[Megan Caldwell]:And we've dated the site to about 2,000 years old and we're finding in this unit tons of herring, tons and tons of herrings.

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[Megan Caldwell]:Herrings are number one species at almost all the sites that we're looking at and quite often it's 70 or 80 percent of the fish taxa coming out of those sites.

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[Megan Caldwell]:Knowing that some of these sites go back 3,000 or 4,000 years and there's herring throughout that time period, it tells us that herring are important and more important and that there's a big problem with them being gone now.

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[Megan Caldwell]:That these fish were always there and people were always using them.