Closed Captions

Neil Main discusses the Gateway to Discovery center in Seaside, Oregon, and explores what the Lewis and Clark Expedition actually discovered in a landscape where Native peoples had thrived for 10,000 years. He examines the ecological science embedded in traditional practices—razor clams, salmon migration, ghost shrimp, and offshore birds—demonstrating how Indigenous cultures developed sophisticated understanding of their environment through close observation and cultural adaptation.

Transcript

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1:38 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the core Discovery 2 and the Ty voices. I see some familiar faces. Um, for our next presenter, this is Neil Main, and he's going to talk about the gateway to Discovery, and he does work for a land trust that manages the gateway to Discovery. So I'm gonna hand it over to Neil Main. Please welcome him.
2:01 Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to uh be making a presentation, uh, both representing the Gateway Discovery and then the North Coast Lanser state is who I work for and kind of the focus of my part of the program for those of you who heard Doug doer, you, you kind of got the historical context in terms of Native American element.
2:23 We're gonna focus a little more on kind of the scientific uh side of uh of the perspective of not only the historical context by which uh the core discovery come to because as you know, for those of you who followed the concept of discovery, usually that includes some element of some unknown or new information and
2:49 To make your group small enough. Uh, then everything is new information. That is, you're just telling your friend next door, uh, then you could well be the source of discovery for a certain piece of information for the person next door, although the information may have been known for decades or centuries.
3:12 So the whole idea of discovery is, is kind of squishy, and I know people have sort of wrestled with this on the Core of discovery and in a way, it's been a struggle to say, what did they discover? You know, people had already been living here, carrying on ecological interactions with every single element of the landscape
3:37 for 10,000 years, kind of what's left to discover. So that, that's one of this sort of what wasn't discovered. That people might think was discovered and then what was actually discovered kind of in our cultural context. And then The really challenging part and the part we're all faced with today is what's left to discover.
4:02 That is, do we know enough to um sustain a culture like ours, uh, For the same period of time that the cultures have been functioning in the landscape we now inhabit. So you kind of set the time frame for what I'm talking about is 10,000 years
4:26 and we'll kind of take 200 years as our operational period and that's sort of appropriate, given. today and all the time that's going on. A couple of things that, uh, that I, I'll mention real quick. One is gateway to discovery. It's a real place. It's uh 850 square feet. It's on the south and the seaside
4:51 for the local people, you know it as the Lavasabi Gallery, but it's now uh the Natural History Center. And there we have Initially started out to create a center where people would really just use that center as the gateway to discovery, that is discovering the incredible place that we have here. Uh, we,
5:16 we had to adjust a little bit because once we got going, we realized that it wasn't really so much the gateway to Ecola State Park and Saddle Mountain and Hut Point and Fort Stevens, but that just walking through the building to the deck that overlooks the estuary ended up being the gateway to a wildlife museum. I mean,
5:39 so much going on every single day and Having been in science for 30 years, you'd think I would have known that, and I knew there were a lot of critters around, but the dynamics of it when we have people, staff there and volunteers there every day, every minute, making notes about what just happened out over the deck.
6:02 From the otters coming in and catching flounders and eating on the logs to the bald eagles catching the fish to the deer come swimming across the river to millions of anchovies coming in, to the gulls being so stuck with anchovies they couldn't even move to the blue herons and the kingfisher fights and, well, it just goes on and on. So in a way, it's kind of portrays this idea that
6:27 when you look closely at anything, You, you usually find action. Uh something's going on and that's what we found. So we sort of modified it, you see you get an experience with discovery at the Gateway Center and then that also leads you to all of the other incredible places uh in this neck of the woods.
6:49 For those of you that maybe haven't Uh, done some of the homework with the Lewis and Clark expedition. To understand it the best, I think you have to understand Jefferson, because Jefferson's mind was scientific. That's where he was. He was probably the top meteorologist in the nation at that time,
7:11 and he would even make his kids keep notes on the temperature when they were somewhere else. You know, I mean, it was just almost fanatical about it. And he had already tried to mount this very expedition. Uh, in 1783, he was already at it trying to make it happen. And they even, even collected funds and had someone that he thought that he was gonna hire
7:35 to make this same trip. And that sort of didn't work out. So working through the Philadelphia Phil Philosophy Society, he had started to organize this expedition and he just never could get it together. And he had all the geography and scientific information that he was wanting to collect. So, you sort of think about,
8:00 and even by the time he was in Congress, he had tried a little run at it, just at, as a congressional person. And had gotten people to put up a whole $1000 to, to finance the expedition. But it sort of fell on deaf ears. He wasn't able to make that happen. So it's not surprising,
8:24 not too long after he became president, that really just kind of pulled the old notes out of his pocket and said, OK, now nobody can tell me we're not gonna do this.
8:37 But scientific A scientific expedition. In 1800 probably wasn't a real hot item. And so his challenge was to cloak it in the thing that Americans are pretty good at, and that's Getting more material wealth. OK. Economics. Get the furs,
9:02 get the products. So that transition, you can see it in the documents in a, in a way you can see the documents being restructured to have this sort of grand benefit to the economics and kind of the social dynamics, including one of Jefferson's greatest passions,
9:24 which was this idea that unless everybody had a piece of land, they were farming. There was really no hope for democracy. So you need a lot more territory to begin with. And what he wanted to know was, is that all nice and flat and plowable, so to speak. And of course, as you know, like we're out here and found all these dirty rotten trees
9:46 just covering the landscape almost as pests. And so it wasn't seen as very productive in that sense, very productive, what would you do with a tree, I mean, not that many trees. So they were looking for farmland.
10:01 Well, uh, when I say cloaking, I, I mean that literally. I mean, including very sophisticated ciphering messages that were written in code to Congress and between Lewis and Jefferson and Jefferson and Congress,
10:21 uh secret coded messages about this expedition. And again, that was sort of the political reality of it was Jefferson had already asked. The
10:35 French ambassadors that about what would people think of this if we went into this territory and you know, he says that would definitely be considered umbrage by, you know, by our, our government and so it would be trespassing uh on our land, which at that point was basically Louisiana, what became the Louisiana versions. And of course, when we bought the Louisiana,
10:59 that sort of took care of that problem on that angle, but of course we still have The English, you know, in the west, and so there, that sort of secret, uh continued on until just about the time in which the expedition left, we're still sending these coded messages. uh
11:23 So that kind of set the stage, but it, again, I think starts to bring up the idea about Jefferson's thought process on this. And keep in mind he thought they were gonna go find mascoons. I mean know, they sort of had a little bit of a science fiction perspective is that this West, even though I can say. Well, I think the folks in your Surrey Museum said, you know,
11:47 funny thing happened on the way for the Lewis and Clark expedition, you know, and that the further they got away from our culture, the more culture they found, you know, literally millions of people already there with full cultures that have uh evolved to very, very sophisticated levels. And our own way have developed a science
12:12 that we're still trying to get to because we haven't Figured out the kind of science in which you can uh Make interpretations without are 7 steps to the scientific method, and yet the cultures that have been here resolved most of those science questions about what to eat, what to use, how to use it, how to prepare it,
12:37 how to treat it, just about everything you can think of in terms of the, the cultural uh adaptations. So, when it come time for uh sort of the eventual expedition to, to leave, there was, you know, a lot of training that had gone on. Lewis has spent a lot of time with sort of major scientists um of the era, uh, describing animals,
13:01 describing technique, uh, spent weeks and weeks getting trained to just run the instruments that were necessary to collect the data about being about surveying and, and geography. So, um, As primitive as it might have been at that point in time compared to today with our, you know, we just got through mapping the plots of plains,
13:26 the very land that, that Clark walked on with a handheld. GPS with an aerial photo of the site that wherever you move on the class of planes, a new aerial photo for that spot scrolls up because it's reading the satellites and then it tracks a little red dot on that aerial photo of where,
13:50 where exactly where you are in the context of that aerial photo. And then if you see something there, then you just scroll up your little data sheet. And plug it. I saw these plants, that plant, this plant this and all that, and then it's all recorded for that single site. And then think about the technology, but in reality, Plus or minus a few
14:16 Miles, probably, in some cases, speed, uh, with those primitive instruments using sort of scientific methodology, uh, Lewis was able to make incredible, uh, records. So again, this is Jefferson kind of making sure that all of the elements of making this expedition
14:39 uh quite documentary. Uh, had been done with the planning process so that whatever skills Lewis, mainly Clark as well didn't have, they got this through some of the top people in the nation at that point in time. So, it, it sort of sets the stage for, for that, uh, that part of it. Uh,
15:03 let me just shift a little bit to sort of what I see as the
15:09 Uh
15:11 Historical sciences of, let's say the West Coast. Uh, and the, and in some ways, I think people don't consider real science if you're doing it. For basic, uh, in a cultural context or for sort of fundamental survival, but the science is something that oftentimes is considered abstraction from the context of the culture,
15:34 and you go to some separate environment for the science, and then you work up the experiment in the design and do all that, and you bring it back to the cultural context. So when the
15:49 On the Native Eskimos, Native Alaskans got together with some of the top scientists in the world. They started a cooperative project in which uh the two scientists merged. And what come out of that was that Um, they were both inadequate, somewhat. They both added, there were pieces missing from the native culture, uh,
16:13 in their form of science, and then there were pieces missing from the western version of it. And so out of that come really a whole new powerful kind of science that was embedded in the cultural process. It wasn't separate or separate from it. And I think that's Well, that has a lot of merit. It also advances my own prejudice,
16:36 which is the way we tend to select what things good and bad. And So in a way we've been promoting this idea of citizen science, that is that science is not something that's relegated to the science group or to the science test, that it's a cultural process and that it could benefit, benefit us in every way.
17:00 We've just been working with a midden that was Uh, opened up from a little excavation was going on for somebody's driveway and uh in that, In that midden was uh these shells and
17:21 Uh, we just said these out just last week really to get some analysis. I've already been through with the stereoscope and there is nothing but clamshells in this entire layer. And also with that was the uh was the charcoal that was left after the clam lake.
17:43 So if you can imagine razor clams. I mean, this sounds so good to me, baking razor clams, you know, on a dune, uh. And leaving nothing but the shells, and that's about as good as it can get. But you know, when you think about it, even with Lewis, Lewis is bringing his, his science here,
18:08 doesn't mention razor clams, OK, in, in the journals, so can't quite make that connection, but might have had some. That time of the year to be digging plants, but think about the weather now, plants just in the last few days here. So here's this sort of common ground of the razor plan, uh,
18:32 not something that's found in the 3 to. 4000 year old men in this area, very few razor clamps. But if you get to the 2000 year radiocarbon material, see razor clams, that's what this, this is all 2000, somewhere between 2000, 2300 years old and
18:58 razor clans are everywhere.
19:01 Uh Keep in mind, we didn't have any sand here until starting about 5000 years ago. ocean was right back against the head walls with all cobble ridges, almost no sand whatsoever. And then somewhere in that intermediate time between 4 and 2000.
19:24 We start seeing these dunes start to grow and they grow again from back against that wall and then start migrating to the west.
19:34 Um
19:36 So there's probably if we get enough good dates there, there's a point where sort of all of a sudden razor plants are showing up because we have sand, we've got beach. Whereas if you look at the midden material from So the Palmero site, which is in a 4000 year old era. It's all bay material,
19:59 almost zero marine materials, OK, cockles, tresses, kaks, a clams, all those kind of bay things. So, there's a big transition that went on in terms of the geography here, and then you see the razor clam showing up.
20:18 And this is where I just try to make one point about this idea of How incredibly valuable and exciting it is to know about the place you live. Because
20:31 It's It gives you an insight that would be comparable to the native science in which you knew about the processes of the natural landscape because you were a part of that landscape, OK, unlike Our culture, which is apart from for the most part,
20:57 and some of the maybes living out in the woods. Digging roots and stuff, but not a lot of folks doing that now. So, this is that sort of comparative in which knowing about the processes. Now I probably almost guarantee you that.
21:16 The folks that dug these plants 2000 years ago would have been hard to imagine the life cycle of a razor plant.
21:25 And I think it was probably a decade ago or so. There used to be a program called Be It was a Festival or something, everybody. brought all their stuff to the convention center and it was just about beach things, what we found on the beach and all about the beach materials.
21:48 I remember I had my students setting up a little program there on razor clams, and they had microscopes to look at the clam larvae and all the different parts of the plant. They had the life cycle put up. Well, we spent the whole night arguing. Mostly with commercial clam diggers about our life cycle, these razor clams, because we have them.
22:11 Releasing eggs and sperm cells into the water right on the shoreline, and then we have these razor clams going all the way out into the ocean, 1520 miles offshore and they're like, no way, I've found little baby razor clams on the beach and They don't do that, but of course, they do, but
22:36 it's hard to imagine raising plants could successfully reproduce by sending little swimming protozoa type critters all the way out into the ocean, spending 6 to 8 weeks out there, and then eventually starting to grow just the tiniest little piece of calcium carbonate on that little larvae, microscopic larvae.
22:58 which then makes the larvae drop down to the bottom of the ocean. And then the currents on the bottom of the ocean slowly start moving all of these. Spat uh baby plants back onto the beach.
23:15 By the millions. And of course, they dig in and, and some of you may have seen this event. I mean, it's an incredible thing when they come in and you're walking and you're pressure in your feet makes these tiny little razor clowns come to the surface.
23:32 Uh, and we aren't the only one that has noticed that if you happen to be there on those few evenings in the spring when that happens, then you'll see these goals down there doing this dance. Going like this. And then I take a few steps, dance,
23:55 and what they're doing is the same thing that we end up doing and that's they're making these little baby razor plants come to the surface and then they eat it, so they're tied into it. So I, I kind of where I'm going on this is to, is to make one point for the presentation and that's that. When you digging razor clams,
24:17 which is the way these razor clams were dug, with a cedar stick stuck into a Uh, up time And that's your dating instrument. And You and your and your 30 or 40 fellow tribes people have got the entire class of each to yourself, it's hard to change,
24:41 have an impact on the ecology. Because one, the efficiency level is not real high, if you can imagine, stick about 3 ft long at the end of this, poking it into the sand, prodding it around and trying to catch razor clam, uh, the productivity was low. And even if you could have caught a million, what would you do with them?
25:03 Because you got the ones you needed for that point in time.
25:08 So, this kind of leads to the So the next step, even without knowing how it worked. Uh, As we saw the sort of cultural shifts from one in which culture was embedded in the science, the life science of the landscape. Then we saw the transition to
25:33 harvest strategies that no longer were embedded in just day to day survival but were then being uh exploited uh and relocated uh as a product material, as much as you can get and you kind of see that sweep all the way through the culture. Uh,
25:56 in which that big conversion in which the technologies started to drive not better lifestyle, not better subsistence, but Uh, alternative products from the product that you're collecting, whether it was razor clams or fish or trees, whatever that might be. So you just see that
26:20 huge uh cultural, uh, transition. So my, the razor plan is kind of my example of And how it changes the way you look at the landscape here in Hudson County and say all the Oregon coast and then as you see the phenomena that plays out, and in a way, it seems,
26:43 it's not surprising that commercial plant diggers were saying those kids, they don't know what they're talking about was because it's just kind of hard to imagine. And it turns out that just about everything that we look at closely ends up being Wow, how, how does that work? How does that all happen, uh, to, to even have any of these systems work?
27:08 And even though the reverence was there for the salmon, Uh, you can imagine how difficult it would have been for cultures, uh, these really very sophisticated cultures from. 3 to 5000 years ago to imagine that a salmon was going to swim 3 to 4000 miles to the Bering Sea.
27:32 Be gone for 3 years. And then come back and find that piece of water that was reared in and not find it by luck, but find it by science. That is that that piece of water has been tagged. Coated by the unique combination of material in that particular watershed.
27:57 371 cedars, 4,221inlock, 851 sword ferns, and then stir well. And you get this product that is so unique that it's can only be in one place. There's no other landscape would have that particular set of materials and all of that, of course, all the pine needles falling under water
28:22 being processed by an inmate, a whole series of, of invertebrate organisms which then pass that through the body, which then add in, well, you kind of see the picture, you have a chemical potion. So unique that it's unique on the planet. So, if you have a olfactory system like salmon do that can sort out
28:45 individual molecules. At the rate of about 1 out of a million, you can find that molecule, then it's not surprising. Uh, that a salmon would swim out of the Mwa River. Swim out of the ocean, go to the Bering Sea, swing by the Asian coast,
29:10 and come back up the California coast and swim into the mouth of the The can
29:18 And start making choices. And so this is the first one that has to make big one left or right, OK. I mean, you either go me one.
29:29 Or you go to cat. So that's the first move. So, The messages start getting read. First of all, you had to just find this place, OK, to begin with, and then you have to start reading these messages about which water as that set of material that was here when I was here last 4 years ago, and since this,
29:54 you know, I'm trying to sort that out and making that hard left. And then No
30:02 Was it Mill Creek? It is my, my parents. lived in Mill Creek and not quite right. There, it's 4 molecules off. So it was gone by. And uh And what about Shangri-a Creek and what about China? 00 great, that's.
30:26 Bells are going off, match up,
30:30 um, and so it takes a hard left up the hill by the elementary school and it's headed back now to that unique place where those salmon would, uh, you know, have their origin and got that, that unique code. I say unique on, on the planet. So, sometimes we tell this story and people say, that is so amazing.
30:55 I mean how in the world can these salmon do that, you know, and Not trying to detract from the absolute marvel of it, of it all. I still remind people, you know, what's really amazing. At least to me, that's, that's all it can do. It could have not done anything else. OK.
31:21 So in a way, It sort of changes the conversation and that There's a certain amount of sort of destiny to this process that is, it isn't really left to little left and maybe it'll work out, be nice and, you know, it's quite precise. And so if you look at some of the things that creatures do.
31:47 And it's, and it's kind of surprising that You know, you think about January. And Clark is mentioning wading in 3 ft of water across, and I got right across the first time and then waded across this Grand River, um. And in those 4 days, at least that Clark was here,
32:13 um, You know, going through All this salmon territory, kind of no mention of salmon.
32:23 No mention of tides, which would have been in January would have been like the biggest deal of all like, as you know, is go to the cove and the waves are going over throwing rocks in the parking lot. You know, very high water. So it's no small item that, and 3 ft of water across the mouth of the river. So,
32:48 I know it's bad weather, but it wasn't bad weather that day, you wouldn't be wading across the mountain mechanical. I can tell you, there wouldn't be a low tide to go across there, and yet they waded across that, but kind of no mention of the salmon. But when we look at the salmon today in the iana system, native salmon in January. December, January, you know, we,
33:12 we sort of considered, we're looking at the same fish that were running through those waters 200 years ago, the same fish that were running through those waters 10,000 years ago. These are all the progeny of those uh individual populations.
33:30 And the irony of it is that there's a, there's a population of about 500 coal that sort out that neijuana system every year and spawn in all those little streams. There's 8 streams in the city of seasides. boundary and 7 of them have spawning coal. In some cases as many as 100 fish,
33:54 so it's still there today. And yet you go to the NMana system and you look at it, it looks kinda, well, might be a little smelly, looks kind of muddy, it's kind of dirty. And uh
34:09 So in some cases when our sort of sarcastic days we say, well, it looks so bad. But no one tried to fix it, so it's still working. So that's kind of the conclusion we got out of that one.
34:26 Well, the other thing that I'll mention, I've covered. I covered razor clams. I didn't mention the ghost shrimp just because
34:38 That had to be a freebie, but the material is so limp, you know, the kiting on a ghost shrimp is just, you know, it's gonna go away pretty fast. And when we went back, well, in the 70s, you know, Smithsonian did an excavation on our site. And they use 1/4 inch sieves to sieve all the material, and they got
35:03 thousands of artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of funnel material, bones and things and But when we went back and found their sie piles and they took the sie piles and stuff that went through the screens and they've got that under a stereoscope, that was where a lot of the world was. I mean, it turns out that
35:26 almost all of the vertebra of the small fish went through that for a screen. And all the little pieces of ghost shrimp went through it. And so there's kind of a, a pretty big missing part of the story about this because Yeah And I guess maybe if they didn't have a low tide, you wouldn't have noticed all those shrimp holes.
35:52 But you know, if I was going someplace for the first time and looking across in the flats of the Viana and that's all I saw. I think it would come up. I would say, what are all those holes in there, you know. And then if you had noticed some creatures. Doing this. You're like,
36:17 what are they doing? And then you stuck around long enough and then you saw what they were doing, you know, the long, longbi cur stop here every year and they grow shrimp. That So
36:32 Just about every creature, and if you tell the story of the ghost shrimp, and people shake their head like the salmon story, like the clam story, like, wait a minute, now you're telling me that those ghost shrimp, they build this U-shaped tube and then those flappers that they have on the bottom of the body, they use those to pump water through
36:55 and invite other guests into that tube. And then pump 400 gallons of water through there and then the bottom of the tube is where all the debris settles, and then they pick through it with those very delicate little mandibles that can almost handle things at the size of a micron, little decaying particles of, of marsh grass and well,
37:20 it kind of keeps going on and then there's things that live on there. Laws that then feed off of some of the material that they, well, it just, you know, sort of like everything we talk about here, it just keeps going a little bit off the chart because it's like, wow, and then take all the complexity of every one of those creatures and adapting
37:43 to sand and reading molecular structure and um and then stir that all cause that's all going on together and a whole bunch of those things. have to interact to survive. So then you take all that complexity and then uh multiply, you know, by factors. For 10 or 10,000.
38:06 So when I look at
38:09 When I look at materials from Native American men in this area and sort of think about A, a, a culture that was embedded in that process themselves with their complexity and their delicate interaction at precise times and many of the, as Doug was talking about in the last session,
38:34 many of those were
38:38 I'll call them esoteric, not that they weren't incredited, but they were imposed views on the system. They didn't arise out of the system, but at the same time, they were imposed over time and therefore their accuracy was comparable to having analyzed the same that situation for analytical values.
39:01 So you have to think about it sort of in, in that uh context. Well, the other one would be the life cycles of the of the near shore birds. Uh, shearwaters and, and we stoers. Uh, in the, in the Palmrose site.
39:19 25 marine birds were found. Uh, in the follow remains, the 25 species. And of that, about 10 of them, you could find them as drift once in a while, but if you're gonna get, get them in new numbers, you have to get in a boat and go offshore. A fair amount to start catching up with albatross and,
39:42 and uh sooty shearwaters and things like that. So that's another part of this sort of grand story is The kind of science that would be embedded in your culture deep enough that you could repeat it all the time to go offshore. And collect up 3 birds.
40:07 Where they're, I mean, we're at and they're big numbers, millions, even now, so they share waters you see, you see 300,000 you know standing at the coal looking offshore and binoculars. So there's lots of them, but getting to them and getting to them at the right time and then of course, understanding how to process and make them a part of their culture, so. Like I say,
40:30 25 species have identified uh right now. In just one mid sight. The other creature that was found at great rates uh was the Clark.
40:47 Which is another challenging creature and very mobile. They're large, they're strong, you know, you have to know a lot about their ecology to catch one. Oh. Where are they? How do they feed, when can you get there, kind of all the, all the sort of insight into uh
41:12 Our culture and some of the inventories.
41:17 Um, The bone material. From a given meter long remains. It was as high as 44, 46. Bone structures from CR and, I mean, this is that kind of density. So there was also some uh sort of collective effects that occurred
41:40 from getting individual organisms that come out at incredibly high rates. Keep in mind the sea are, you know, long gone from here, but more than likely. You know, they were managing large kelp beds of Tomaca and were a part of that kelp. Sea urchin
42:03 CR cycle, which is kind of. Those um sort of complex. features
42:09 Uh, we're out of time. Got a couple of little giveaways. This is just a reminder, a little bit about today's discussion, and that's, that, uh,
42:22 My goal here is kind of help you change the way you look at a tree. And when you see the limbs on a tree, It's easy to think the limbs are on the outside of the tree. But when you sort of see this picture, it's a stump which everything inside the stump rotted away except the lens.
42:45 And even though it looks like a torture chamber, it's really the inside of a tree and what the limb looks like from the tree's perspective. OK. So grab one of these if you're interested. It's got a nice little reminder. Uh, for you, which is kind of my party comment. Uh, and it's a challenge for all of us as we sort of head into this next,
43:10 uh, decade about thinking about our place and how to live sustainably in it. So that's the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody has thought about that which everyone has seen. Thank you.
43:36 Do you have any questions for
43:40 I It's just that I wondered what the word is it mitten.
43:47 Yeah and how would you define that. Sure I would OK. It's, it's kind of the cultural living site. It may have been a short-term camp site or may have been a long-term living site in which uh lacking garbage service. Uh, it just kind of went out the back door of the long house and all the organic material, and it piled up
44:12 and it decayed and sank down and someone turned soil and, and so it become the, the history of the cultural. For the most part, food gathering and in seaside, there's maybe the greatest legacy of any city on the entire city coast of Mid
44:35 where there was cultural Uh, inhabitants for thousands of years, uh, starting about 4000 years ago, and those are maybe 10 ft deep. And then every inch of this, some piece of history going back thousands of years and so there were lots of salmon this year, lots of salmon work, not too many in the next year,
45:00 so you, you can sort of restructure the history of the culture by going through that.
45:09 And
45:10 Would that be an archaeological It is, yeah, it's uh
45:17 Yeah, it's a common term for the West Coast anyway where, yeah, OK, yeah, that's, that's it. It's, uh, and many of them do have just shelves because The, the um Natives moved from one location to the other depending on the availability of a harvest for that particular time. So you find these clam mittens, only clamshells,
45:42 nothing else, uh, sort of from here north.
45:49 What did they, what did they do with the ghostman?
45:54 You said there was go shrimp there. What did they do? Why were they?
46:00 Um,
46:04 That they might have eaten them. I, there's not much there. for Eating part of it, so they may well have used the claws for something or some portion of it, but uh they, they're just there, so how they were used, I, I don't know, we haven't seen anything made out of them, like, unlike the say the Uh
46:29 sand snail that you find out on the beach, uh, all about, uh. You know, they collected those, probably didn't eat them, but if you take a fingernail file and just rub on the very end of it. It takes just a few swipes and you knock the end off and then it's hollow all the way through.
46:54 So that becomes a really nice bead really for some of the first beads on the necklaces.
47:02 You have time for one more question? OK.
47:05 I'd like to get back to uh Jefferson. You said that uh Jefferson and his sons we report temperature.
47:15 So I'd like to ask a couple of people.
47:18 The
47:20 One is the Lewis and Clark report any temperatures? I don't think they did. They had, what sort of thermometer would they have used?
47:31 The third sort of related question is, uh, the salmon going upstream. Do they respond to gradients in temperature and the migration or is it a chemical gradient? Well, as far as we know, it's gradient, but Temperature can be a barrier. That is You feel
47:53 Those who were in the west 2 years ago when they started going up to Plymouth basin and The largest fish die-off in history occurred in the Plymouth River. 78,000 shrimp salmon died from the temperature barrier. Because so much water is evil in that system. So, Temperature for salmon can be bury. I,
48:16 I don't know about the thermometers. Uh But
48:23 I haven't looked at the journals to see. If there is any precision about temperature, uh, I don't remember seeing anything, but there might be something there.
48:37 I see, right, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to wrap up our program for today. I'll be here for a few minutes, so it's like to thank you for coming in and talking with us this afternoon.
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Neil Main on Gateway to Discovery and Northwest Coast Ecology

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Neil Main on Gateway to Discovery and Northwest Coast Ecology

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