Opportunistic Whale Hunting on the Southern Northwest Coast: Ancient DNA, Artifact, and Ethnographic Evidence

Two modes of whale use have been documented on the Northwest Coast of North America, namely systematic whale hunting and whale scavenging. Ethnographically, systematic hunting was practiced only by Native groups of southwestern Vancouver Island and the northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. This hunting was undertaken with technology specifically designed for the task. Other groups on the Northwest Coast reportedly did not hunt whales but did utilize beached animals. Here we present archaeological evidence of whaling from the northern Oregon coast site of Par-Tee in the form of a bone point lodged in a whale phalange. This hunting likely occurred 1,300 to 1,600 years ago. Ancient DNA extracted from the phalange proves it to be a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). DNA recovered from the bone point indicates that it is made from elk (Cervus elaphus) bone, and the point's DNA sequence is identical to that from unmodified elk bone from Par-Tee, suggesting the whale was locally hunted. We present ethnohistoric data from the southern Northwest Coast describing opportunistic whale hunting with a variety of technologies. We argue that many groups along the west coast of North America likely occasionally hunted whales in the past and that this hunting occurred using nonspecialized technologies.