Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
The ambition of 4-OCEANS is global. To be achievable at this scale, the Norway-based team is applying the methodology of systematic review. It is gathering, integrating, analysing, highlighting and celebrating decades of high quality research by experts working with zooarchaeological evidence.
The Northern Seas Synthesis and Eastern North American Synthesis
Systematic reviews following pre-determined search strategies can also be greatly augmented by iterative learning-driven reviews entailing close collaboration with regional experts. A wealth of legacy zooarchaeological datasets containing information about the occurrence and abundance of fish taxa at Late Holocene archaeological sites exist globally. The Northern Seas Synthesis and the Eastern North American Synthesis are two ‘big data’ initiatives supported by 4-OCEANS that seek to compile these data into open-source databases and test socio-ecological hypotheses using data science methods. To date, the Northern Seas Synthesis (led by Danny Buss and James Barrett) includes c. 1.9 million identified fish bones from c. 3600 assemblages across ten countries bordering the North and Baltic Seas. First publication is anticipated in autumn 2024. Crucially important project collaborators for the Northern Seas Synthesis research include Mohsen Falahati Anbaran, Adam Boethius, Monica K. Dütting, Monica N. Enehaug, Inge Bødker Enghoff, Anton Ervynck, Sheila Hamilton-Dyer, Jennifer F. Harland, Dirk Heinrich, Anne Karin Hufthammer, Inge van der Jagt, Beatrice Krooks, Hans Christian Küchelmann, Alison Locker, Lembi Lõugas, Ola Magnell, Daniel Makowiecki, Emma Maltin, Hanneke J.M. Meijer, Rebecca Nicholson, Liz Quinlan, Kenneth Ritchie, Hannah Russ and Wim Van Neer.
Eastern North American Synthesis
Fishing has a deep history in North America that stretches from the Late Pleistocene to the present-day. In many Indigenous and settler societies, fishing was not only an important subsistence activity, but played a role in shaping social and political systems. Humans in turn have had varying effects on the continent's fish populations. In some cases, past peoples were able to maintain the productivity of fish stocks for centuries or millennia, often through the use of management strategies. In other cases, humans have depressed fish populations through the alteration of aquatic habitats and/or overfishing. Both past and ongoing climate change have also had indelible effects on the distribution and abundance of North American fish species.
Figure 1. Study area of the Eastern North American Synthesis project.
Figure 2. Geographic distribution of archaeological assemblages included in the Eastern North American Synthesis database to date.
Since the mid-20th century, fish remains have been increasingly recovered in a systematic manner from archaeological sites in northeastern North America (Figure 1). These fish bone assemblages represent an important archive of information about the changing relationships between fish, humans, and the environment in the region. Over the years, these data have been disseminated through a variety of venues with differing levels of accessibility, including articles, books, theses, and gray literature reports. The Eastern North American Synthesis project (eNAS) seeks to increase the accessibility of these data through the creation of an open-source database of archaeological ichthyofaunal assemblages from the region dating to the past 3000 years. For each assemblage, the database includes information about the abundance (Number of identified specimens) of the fish taxa represented. The database also includes information about the assemblage’s chronology, the recovery method used to collect the fish remains (e.g., screened, hand-collected, unknown), as well as other meta-data. Using data science methods to analyze the database, the eNAS project aims to examine how the relative importance of different fish taxon exploited in northeastern North American varied across time, space, and cultures, and identify the drivers underlying the observed patterns.
As of July 23, 2024, the eNAS database includes 188,183 identified fish bones from 521 assemblages from five Canadian provinces and ten American states (Figure 2).
The Eastern North American Synthesis project is being led by Thomas Royle and James Barrett in collaboration with zooarchaeologists and archaeologists working in the region. Contributors to eNAS project include Susan Trevarthen Andrews, Matthew Betts, Christian Gates St-Pierre, James Gibb, Brad Hatch, Gabriel Hrynick, J. Ryan Kennedy, Helen Kristmanson, Henry Miller, Eréndira Quintana Morales, Frances Stewart, and Martin Welker.