When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early 1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer, marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered. Since then, people assumed such faunal wealth represented California's natural condition – a product of Native Americans' living in harmony with the wildlife and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern environmental damage.
The news release below is a story by University of Utah Public Relations science writer Lee Siegel, published this month in the spring 2006 issue of Continuum, the magazine of the University of Utah.
That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years – from 1997 to 2004 – painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. He determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn't possible, at least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years.
. . .
Broughton says his study challenges "a common perception about ancient Native Americans as healthy, happy people living in harmony with the environment. That clearly was not always the case. Depending on when and where you look back in time, native peoples were either living in harmony with nature or eating their way through a vast array of large-sized, attractive prey species."
Interestingly, this research (and it's been going on for a while) hasn't attracted (that I know of) quite the controversy surrounding other findings that can cast aboriginal groups in a negative light, such as cannibalism in the southwest. This will undoubtedly attract some of that sort of attention. It will no doubt also provide some, at least rhetorical, support for the Overkill Hypothesis of late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions.
Our graduate student careers intersected for a time at the University of Washington. See Jack's page at the U of Utah. My God, he still looks exactly the same as he did then! Outlines of some of his research are here and also his list of publications which documents the type of foraging models he works with.