Crockford: Archeological evidence of Thunnus thynnus off British Columbia and northern Washington 
21 
they fed at the surface in shallow inshore waters (lo- 
cated by spotters positioned on nearby cliffs). Biolu- 
minescent plankton present in the water made the 
big fish especially visible at night, even from a distance. 
A fire was sometimes built in the bow of the 
hunter’s canoe to attract the fish to within spearing 
distance, a strategy called “pit-lamping.” Another 
method was to paddle the canoe quickly away from 
an area where tuna were spotted: the canoe created 
a path of light as it moved through the biolumines- 
cence. The tuna would follow the light, right up to 
and under the canoe, and were harpooned as they 
emerged at the bow. The word for tuna (“silthkwa”) 
means “like the bow wave made by a boat,” and un- 
doubtedly reflects their surface-feeding behavior. 
These tuna were always referred to as “big fish, 6 to 
8 feet (ca. 180-244 cm TL) long.” 
George Louis of the Ahousat Band was about 80 
years old when interviewed in 1992. He said that his 
father told a story about the tuna hunting he ob- 
served as a small boy (perhaps when about 10 years 
old) sometime between 1880 and 1890. No official 
records or unofficial accounts have been found which 
indicate that large tuna have been observed in Brit- 
ish Columbia waters since that time. Large bluefin 
tuna were captured, however, by sport anglers dur- 
ing the 1890’s in southern California (Holder, 1913). 
The only written reference to tuna found to date 
in the historic record is a footnote in the account of a 
meeting between George Vancouver and Bodega y 
Quadra at Nootka Sound in 1792. Mention is made 
of a porpoise and tuna stew (“large Tunny and a 
Porpus”) being served during a feast given in their 
honor by Nuu-chah-nulth chief Maquinna on 4 Sep- 
tember 1792 (Lamb, 1984, p. 304). There is, of course, 
no way of knowing if the “tuna” was bluefin tuna, 
some other tuna species, or some other taxon alto- 
gether. The capture of porpoise, however, would have 
required similar hunting skills and equipment as 
those described above for bluefin, and both could have 
been caught during a single hunting expedition. “Por- 
poise” remains are reported from a number of coastal 
shell middens (Mitchell, 1988) and are most likely to 
be either harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena, 
white-sided dolphin, Lagenorhyncus obliquidens, or 
Dali’s porpoise, Phocoenoides dalli (Leatherwood et 
al., 1988). Moreover, bluefin tuna (even very large 
ones) would have been quite familiar to the Europe- 
ans exploring the coastal waters of British Colum- 
bia because the similar Atlantic subspecies occurs in 
European coastal waters. In marked contrast to the 
many unknown species regularly encountered by 
explorers in the north Pacific, large bluefin tuna 
might have been so familiar that they did not war- 
rant special comment. 
Discussion 
Archeological evidence and potential 
sampling bias 
The archeological remains described above represent 
a size class of bluefin tuna previously unknown in 
the northern portion of the eastern Pacific and con- 
stitute a small but valuable biological sample of the 
ancient population. However, some of the cultural 
and taphonomic (postdepositional) influences that 
affected the sample must be considered before eco- 
logical or zoogeographic interpretations can be made. 
The archeological shell middens from which the 
bluefin tuna specimens have been recovered are es- 
sentially garbage dumps created over many centu- 
ries by the disposal of food and other household 
waste. The calcium carbonate leaching from abun- 
dant shellfish remains in these midden deposits ef- 
fectively neutralizes acids in the soils that would oth- 
erwise rapidly destroy bone. Preservation of verte- 
brate skeletal remains is often excellent under these 
conditions, even after several thousand years. 
The bones of animals recovered during archeologi- 
cal excavation of a shell midden represent a very 
small portion of the animals harvested by aboriginal 
people. Many processes operate on the carcass of a 
harvested animal to reduce the number of bones that 
might eventually be discarded into a midden ( Davis, 
1987; Lyman, 1994). These include butchering meth- 
ods, distribution of edible parts (sharing), cooking 
procedures, and consumption of the edible portions. 
Some bones may have been set aside for tool or orna- 
ment manufacture (only one piece of altered bluefin 
tuna has been recovered: a vertebra fashioned into a 
spool, from the Ozette Village site in Washington). 
Moreover, scavengers, especially dogs and birds, may 
have removed or destroyed parts of a carcass so that 
in the end only a few bones from any given animal 
are represented in the midden. Finally, only small 
portions of most large midden deposits are actually 
excavated by archeologists, further reducing the 
sample of harvested animals available for archeo- 
zoological analysis (Ringrose, 1993, for detailed dis- 
cussions of these issues; Lyman, 1994). For example, 
the remains of the 36 individual bluefin tuna recov- 
ered from Barkley Sound (Table 6) represent an em- 
pirically undeterminable fraction of what was actu- 
ally harvested and consumed by the aboriginal people 
in that area. In addition, the number of fish success- 
fully landed constituted a very small proportion of 
the available population of bluefin tuna. Presumably 
only a few bluefin tuna would have been actively 
pursued and some of these would invariably have 
been lost during the hunt. Thus, even if only one gi- 
