 Today at the Archaeological Research Facility Bag Lunch Series, another great talk will happen. I'm Christine Hastor, if you don't know me, the Director of the Archaeological Research Facility, and every week we have a speaker at this time and other events that go on. But we do have one announcement. Where did you go, Daisy? There you are. You were there last time. We have one announcement, please. For those of you who are last week, sorry for the repeat, but it's going to be an education outreach opportunity on October 20th. It's going to be about a 9.30 to 2.30 p.m. commitment to town about 30, 35 miles from here. We're just going to pass around a sign-up sheet for if you want more information. It's not that far away, so I'm trying to keep it all rolling. If you signed up last week, you won't have to sign up again, but this is for people who will be joining the first time. Thank you. Okay, great. All right, thank you. Does anybody else have an announcement of events or talks happening in the next few days? Meg? In the next few days, of course, on Monday is Sonia Adelaide. That's right. It's the eighth. You're right. Just around the corner, two to four. Yeah, right. In a Gifford room. I've just been in touch with her to see if she's willing and interested in meeting with graduate students. This is Sonia Adelaide to University of Massachusetts at Emerson. There's been a lot of pioneering work in, especially in Indigenous and community-based literature and archaeology, and she is a Berkeley Ph.D., and so we're very happy to have her come home. And so I will be in touch through the various e-mail lists if we actually get something set up before we leave. Thank you. Yes, that's right. That is just around the corner. It is Monday. It seemed like a long way away, and now it's here. Right, yeah. Good. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. So I would like to introduce our speaker today, which is so we're welcoming him by learning about his work. He got his degree at the University of Oregon, I believe, and worked up and down the West Coast, I think I could say the West Coast of North America, California in particular, it seems like. Certainly we're going to hear about that today. He has been teaching at San Diego State, but has just this summer shifted to a job here at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. And I'm sure many of you have been to that wonderful building there and seen the exhibits. So he is now currently the Irvine Chair of Anthropology and Associate Curator at the California Academy of Sciences right here in San Francisco. So he is a neighbor now, which is wonderful. And he clearly has been working on marine uses in archaeology of this region of the world. And we're going to hear about a really wonderful and mysterious, at least to me, item, and that is abalone. So he's going to tell us about his recent research on shellfish in the title, Shellfish for the Celestial Empire, wonderful name. A deep history of the birth, collapse, and future of California abalone fishing. So thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks for having me. Well, it's great to be here. So thanks for the great introduction and the invitation. If you don't know that Alfred Crobier was our first curator of anthropology at the Cal Academy, you stole him away from us after only a couple of years. He was hired in 1900. And so we've had a long relationship with Berkeley. And one of the things that I'd like to do with my position is continue that and make that even stronger. So I welcome all of you or any of you to email me, to if we have wonderful collections, we have wonderful folks at Cal Academy. And there's lots of interactions and collaborations we can have. And so please, part of me being here is hopefully we can explore some of that, students and faculty and everyone in between. You're not allowed to tell anyone, but as I was driving here, I'm swearing you all the secrecy, including the people watching on video. This is I think my 25th anniversary of my rejection letter from UC Berkeley. So I'm very proud to be invited here to give a talk. And so all right, so I'm going to sort of talk to you about some of the research that I've been doing recently on the Channel Islands in particular on California abalone. And I went to do my graduate work at the University of Oregon to work on issues of historical ecology. And I was very focused on the prehistoric archeology of coastal California and particularly the Channel Islands. And as I was doing my research, I kept running into these sites. And every archeologist besides Mike Glassow in the 1980s who recorded two of these site types walked right past them because they are the most seemingly boring sites on the islands. They're just piles of mostly large, whole and broken black abalone shells and they tend to be nothing else. And these were created in the mid-19th century. And as I would walk past these at first as well as I focused on and you have to forgive myself and many other archeologists in the Channel Islands, if you record every site or you stop to look at every site that you walk past, you'll never get anything done. You'll never accomplish your research goals. There are just thousands of sites, still many unrecorded, many unsampled. And these were just ones that we tended to walk by. But then I started to realize this was a really important part of the historical ecology of coastal California and filled in a major gap in our understanding of human-marine interactions through deep time. So these sites were created in the mid-19th century by immigrant Chinese abalone fishers who came over during the California Gold Rush. And you probably all know parts of this story that centers out of San Francisco about the rise of the Gold Rush, the flood of California, of immigrant populations around the world, coming to California and San Francisco in particular, and then the contributions of Chinese immigrants to many industries in California like Chinese laundries and railroad labor and gold mining and sort of important historic families that we've learned a lot about, the immigrant Chinese experience in 19th and 20th century California. And part of this history too, and one that's not really told as widely is the history of the first commercial abalone fishing that Chinese immigrants developed shortly after they arrived during the California Gold Rush. So I work on this story. Mostly in the Northern Channel Islands, you probably are all familiar, four offshore islands, Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, just north of LA off of Santa Barbara in Alta, California. And I was focused on the prehistoric history because the prehistoric history is really celebrated on these islands. We have some of the oldest archeological sites along the New World Coast. This is Arlington Springs, it was found in 1959, I believe, in the 1950s by Phil Orr at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Recently redated to 13,000 years by John Johnson and Shumash representatives as well, making it some of the oldest human remains found in North America and certainly along our coastlines. And then we've been filling in this gap so this was human remains and not much else. And we filled in the gaps on the Channel Islands in the last 10 years or so, showing some of these earliest paleocostal peoples. We're using sophisticated stem point technology, crescent technology, doing things like hunting snow and Canada goose. 12,000 years ago, chendieties and now extinct form of flightless duck. And so we've learned an incredible amount about the early colonization and the history of these, the earliest peoples on the AIDS Islands. And in fact, the islands are this incredible place. This is probably one of my favorite spots on all the islands. This is on San Miguel Island, on Northwest San Miguel Island, Otter Point, a massive dune complex. Each of these little lines is a shell midden that was built at the top of the dune and occupied for some interval. And if you add all these together, this is 7,000 years of human history in this one spot, but also ecological history of people interacting with these marine environments. Just to give you some scale, there's two people standing at the top of this dune. So just really majestic place. And we know from this rich archaeological record that extends continuously from at least 13,000 years all the way up to European contact, evolution of hunting technologies, fishing technologies, voting technologies. And if you've studied much and if you know about the record in coastal California and California in general, the entire history of the islands really could be told in my hand here. So these are purple olive snail shells that were made into beads and ornaments starting at least 10,000 years ago and then evolved into a sophisticated shell money bead network, breaking up the beads, using chert drills to grind them into money beads. Each bead had a value that was standardized, at least each string of beads had a value that was standardized and these were traded all over the American West, down into Mexico, Central Oregon, and certainly all over California, right? So this development of a sophisticated sociopolitical shell bead trading network on the islands, and again this rich history. And then we have that all sort of fundamentally changed with the establishment of the mission period and starting in 1769 and prior to this with contacts by Cabrillo in the 16th century. But missionization certainly by 1822 caused the abandonment or the removal of shumash peoples from their islands, the fundamental change of these indigenous life ways and the establishment of the mission period in the historic period. And the islands then converted from shumash hunting and gathering homes to ranching outposts. And these stories are well known if you work on the Channel Islands. There's this cast of ranching characters as the islands were converted into cattle and sheep and pig and deer and elk hunting centers in the mid 19th and through the 20th century. The Lester family called themselves the king of San Miguel Island. Here's this ranch complex on San Miguel. And again this sort of changed the ecology of the islands and is sort of emblematic or looms large in the history and evolution of these ecosystems. And at the same time the marine systems were changing fundamentally too as the terrestrial systems around the islands were being changed by the introduction of these domestic animals and wild animals. Of course in the historic period the sea otter hunting depleted North Pacific ecosystems of this prime predator of an apex predator throughout much of its range the hunting for its pelts and trade network that developed out of that caused this commercial hunting of the seas as we had the commercialization of the islands itself with the ranching period. I characterize this as like the sea of slaughter. This was the time in the 18th and 19th century that cetaceans, sea mammals were driven to the brink of extinction as this insatiable hunt for their pelts and blubber and other materials ramped up. And just to give you some scale of this otters were quickly depleted out of North Pacific systems and it was this commercial trade of otters that connected the Pacific Rim with these markets and cantons and as otter pelts declined and became harder to find and harder to get the prices just skyrocketed. So this market system where rarity should allow those animals to in a sort of hunting and gathering situation would allow those animals to recover but the market system just drove them to the brink of extinction. It was only a small group of otters in the remote Big Sur coast that couldn't be accessed or weren't found that has helped reestablish populations in some of their ranges around the Pacific. So these ecosystems changes led to a number of consequences in marine systems and one of those consequences was being out of the two primary predators of abalone humans coastal indigenous populations that were hunting and harvesting abalone and the removal of otters from the system that are voracious predators of abalone allowed populations to just explode around California, right? And so here's some pictures from Santa Cruz Island of black abalone which is an intertidal species growing one on top of the other in just unseen densities stuff that we've never seen at least in the Holocene, right? Really large one on top of the other in just these incredible densities as they were released from predation pressure. So this is the scene that was set in 1848 when gold was discovered in Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada's and of course this sparked the California Gold Rush and minors from fortune seekers from all over the world flooded San Francisco to find their fortunes in the foothills of California and more broadly the American West. This included 116,000 Chinese immigrants between 1848 and 1876 as the single largest group of immigrants to make their way to San Francisco and California during the California Gold Rush and so some idea of this mass immigration to California. And I put this picture up because at least initially everyone was working for the same goal and while there were tensions here's a photo of white and Chinese minors working together in 1852 race relations, relations between groups seeking their fortunes was at least not hostile but it didn't take long for the mother load to dry up and tensions to rise and white minors to become frustrated with immigrant populations that were stealing the wealth of California and exporting it to families overseas and blaming immigrants for things like depressed wages as that initial gold bonanza dried up. And because of that unrest and the government of California state governments started issuing taxes targeted racist targeted taxes on Chinese and other immigrant minors although it was for immigrant minors but really many of these taxes and fees targeted immigrant Chinese populations they were easy to identify they were easy to blame and so things like the foreign minors license imposed a $20 tax per month on all foreign minors and while Chinese minors were only a part of the foreign minor group in California they took the brunt of the taxes and it was taxes and targeted legislation like this that famously drove Chinese immigrants to the economic and geographic margins of California for jobs as cooks, laundry workers, servants as they could no longer or as many of them found it too difficult and too many roadblocks to make a living in the California gold industry and of course you probably know this led to immigrants, Chinese immigrants to recognize the untapped potential along our coast while everyone in California was sort of blinded by yellow fever, gold fever the gold haze the resources along our coast were left untapped so famously Chinese immigrants slid into this industry many of these immigrants, the vast majority of them came from Guangdong province a coastal province in China they probably had the tools, the knowledge, the ability to access these resources and so here's a squid drying a squid processing camp in Monterey in 1886 and one of the, so you hear about squid you hear about the Chinese shrimp industry one you may not have heard of is Chinese immigrants were the first to recognize the untapped potential of these hyper abundant abalone in California so the first commercial abalone fisheries pop up in the 1850s the earliest we have is in 1853 in Monterey the first on the islands at least documented in historic newspaper accounts 1856 and here's an account from the Los Angeles Star in 1861 the extent and importance of our coast fisheries are not we think generally known or appreciated a very large business is being carried on in this department along the coast in the islands in the channel from Santa Barbara down we are not agreeably surprised to find the number of men in vessels engaged in our fishery as well as the capital expended and fitting out the same Chinese fishermen are not limited to any particular kind of fishing taking a large quantity of abalones so these uninteresting sites on the island they're finding them quite interesting now right and have spent ten years looking at them are the records of these first the birth of commercial abalone fishing in California and what they are are mostly thin layers of black abalone shells built in historic doomsands along rocky intertidal shorelines they're relatively small they seem to be logistical short term highly specialized foraging camps where Chinese immigrants were dropped off on the channel islands stayed out for three months at a time and systematically harvested abalone up and down the coast of the northern islands and much of coastal California that's been the record has been wiped out by erosion by development by Walmarts and McMansions right on the coast but this record has been left largely intact on the channel islands I've spent the last ten years with students just finished up much of this work trying to identify these sites and document these sites along the island and again they tend to be these small logistical foraging camps they don't have much else in them as people were walking along the coast now that's not always true right a few sites have things like brownstone where pottery evidence of these fishermen bringing out with them things like pickled vegetables, soy sauce wine and all the food stuffs that they would need to survive on the island I've always found this quite strange these were expert fishermen we have no evidence that they were actually doing any fishing other than for abalone and bringing out everything they needed in these brownstone where pottery and historical counts of sacks of rice and things we also have evidence of things like spice bottles but perhaps more interesting here's something I stole off the internet this is an opium glass lamp or this is an opium lamp we have the glass from some of these opium lamps at certain sites a few sites around the channel islands again sort of passing the time as you're out there for three months at a time in the evenings perhaps as part of these fishing expeditions and then perhaps some of my favorite we think these we can't be 100% confident they're associated with Chinese fishermen but these englammatic stellar sea lion rings and we have the whole sequence from western San Miguel Island the canines themselves the sawn bits or blanks created and then the ground and polished ivory rings that were being made here a couple of cracks were discarded on the islands again perhaps a way to pass the time in these fishing camps right and so some of these sites there used to be places where schooners and steamers were dropping Chinese fishermen off at central locations and then they would walk along the along the islands harvesting black abalone drying them and bringing them back to central locations for processing and shipment to the mainland and then ultimately much of it overseas right so this commercial industry starts to ramp up so here's there's a number of different descriptions of how this fishing happened here's one of them they're all largely similar just to give you some idea it's from 1871 San Diego Union the abalone is found attached to rocks and extreme low tide the greater quantities than any other time the fish covered by dense shell adheres to the rock as tightly as if glued and is cut loose with a sharp implement after filling a large bag with meat which is removed from the shell it is carried to the place chosen to dry it and receives a good pounding after this beating the meat is thrown into a large kettle and boiled for a short time is then spread out in the sun to dry after a thorough drying is nicely packed in strong sacks shipped to San Diego or Santa Barbara or local markets to be reshipped from here to Chinese merchants in San Francisco the meat commands in that city is 5 to 6 cents per pound and is used exclusively by the Chinese a considerable quantity is shipped to China whereas regarded as a great luxury only being used by the better class of society so one of the reasons abalone was largely ignored is it was seen by white Americans, white Californians as inedible it wasn't a resource and it was consumed almost exclusively in China times by immigrant Chinese communities and then shipped overseas where the abalone market had been overfished in mainland China and then dried up and they were getting quite robust prices in these overseas markets and developing this trans-Pacific industry for abalone and these central locations then they were dropped off and there were places where abalone was processed, packed up and then ships could come to pick up the load and the fishermen and bring them back to the mainland for their journey to local consumption or overseas consumption so here on western San Miguel this is Point Bennett here we found one of these central locations a hearth feature an abalone pavement packed but primarily black abalone and then a couple features these sort of horseshoe shaped or U shaped hearth features you can see them here there's a remnant of probably one of these cleaned out and then a picture here kind of describing this parties of Chinese fishermen were on the various Channel Islands most of the year Rogers and brothers of the city sent out today for San Miguel the number of abalone to be attained by such a party is impossible to estimate low tide being the only time when they can be gathered at the lower tide the more they are exposed to view and so these vast tanks were probably taken out abalone boiled and dried packed up and then brought back to mainland markets and in fact these horseshoe shaped hearth features we see as they are emblematic Chinese camps we see them in the mining industry as well here's one depicted back here and a part of the way that Chinese immigrants were constructing hearth features all over California at the time and in the fact it wasn't just abalone meat that was being pounded and processed a commercial industry for the shell was developed as well for lacquer ware for overseas for wine for construction purposes for decoration for inlay purposes and when the shell was valuable when the market was good they would ship the shell back to the mainland and then overseas as well when the market dove and it wasn't profitable they would leave it stockpile the shells on the islands and then reharvest that stuff later come back and harvest that stuff later just to give you some scale one of my graduate students at San Diego State did a lot of work in historic records trying to look at the scale of this industry and it was for both the meat and the shells it was an incredible industry and at times the shell even outvalued the meat abalone drying racks from Baja California we even have the remnants of these on the islands the racks themselves the stakes that were probably made to construct these drying racks on the islands so Chinese immigrants built this industry they built a trans-pacific commercial trade for shells and meat and they controlled this industry for at least two decades in California for the slow growing inner title black abalone they weren't going for other abalone species that were subtitled because they didn't have diving equipment so it was gathering during low tides for inner title black and they ranged up and down the coast across the channel islands harvesting this material this industry well things really rapidly changed beginning in the 1870s and an anti-Chinese sentiment started to reach a fever pitch in California again many of you are probably familiar with this story but ironically this happened because we solved two of our biggest problems one the ending of the Civil War that caused this market this labor to flood the market and economic depression and then economic depression in California because the completion of the transcontinental railroad right so once the railroad was completed it was supposed to bring cheap goods to California create a market for goods in California back to the east coast and what it did is it allowed at least initially for well established factories along the east coast to ship their cheap goods to California or their less cheap goods their less expensive goods to California and undermine the market and then allowed that labor to make it out to California the labor crisis in California and this spawned the partly these two success stories in the United States spawned or helped grow this anti-Chinese sentiment they really reached a fever pitch with the establishment of the working men's party in the 1870s its leader was Dennis Kearney who was a failed gold miner and an Irish immigrant himself an immigrant himself who took to ending many of his speeches around California that raged about labor and government overstep and the lack of resources for working peoples throughout the country to he took to ending his speeches with that Chinese must go blaming clearly blaming Chinese immigrants and propaganda that was popping up all over California in the state so it didn't take long for federal and state lawmakers to listen to this growing anti-Chinese sentiment and then in 1882 perhaps one of the biggest black eyes in our history was established with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 this started 60 years of state and federal sponsored racism in the United States and the act excluded skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining from entering the United States two years later with article 14 no court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship again this state sponsored racism that wasn't repealed until 1943 as we blame Chinese immigrants for the for the economic woes of our country and California in particular so an increasing series of legislations then were targeted at Chinese immigrants in many industries and in particular the industries like the fishing industry in California the Scott Act of 1882 revised Exclusion Act of 1890 it made it very difficult for Chinese immigrants to make a living in these fisheries that they established in California including abalone fishery so this really by 1880 this really marks the end or the rapid decline in this industry in the commercial industry restricting ownership of Chinese junk vessels reentry into American ports the collection of abalone this series of legislation that were targeted at basically removing Chinese fishermen from the industry in fact California department of fishing game admitted as such that these laws were designed to save California abalone from quote thoroughgoing the usual lack of foresight that they were taking abalone and other resources with total disregard for its conservation so once Chinese immigrants were sort of legislated out of the industry and at the same time other groups were recognizing its potential Japanese and Euro-American divers sort of expanded the abalone industry to not only include black abalone but subtitle species as well like red, pink, green and white abalone we have some record of that on the Channel Islands here off San Miguel probably right off that same spot that I showed you earlier with those hearth features in Japanese ceramics here's a hard hat diving outfit Japanese diving outfit again sort of flooding that industry in the late 19th century California isn't that large like really were introduced to the joys of abalone in 1915 right with the California exposition right here in San Francisco this was to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal which incidentally was completed earlier than planned is that ever happened and it was sort of the San Francisco and California celebration of California right everything that California had to offer to the United States and the world and included a 1300 seat dining hall with 350 varieties of local seafood to sort of educate California and the wider United States on marine resources they produced a cookbook and though it wasn't in the cookbook one of the things they did at the fair was educate people on how to cook and prepare abalone you have to pound it the way you cook it becomes important so it doesn't turn into shoe leather and sort of celebrating the joys of abalone this really sparked a wider interest not only in local consumption but in the commercial fishery of abalone and at this point Euro-Americans really entered into the fishery and abalone started to be consumed by a wider community throughout the state, throughout the country in 1913 the U.S. government passed the alien lands law prohibited quote aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land or property and basically handed control of the abalone industry over to Euro-Americans right and this was the coup de gras really was the end of the Chinese fishery for abalone in California and at this time we start to see abalone pop up along California, New York and other places on bills of fare, on menus so things like abalone chowders first starts show up in 1960 and abalone steak in 1923 this stuff is really cool because you start to look through it cost 60 cents for a fried abalone steak which is about 650 in today's currency you need an extra 50 dollars probably to have that meal today right so it becomes this cuisine of a wide populace right and the industry then ramps up and becomes not just a commercial industry that's largely shipped overseas but a locally consumed industry we have things like the pierce brothers this is a abalone processing shop out of Santa Barbara 1933 with the mountain of abalone shells enter into this commercial industry and the commercial harvest really ramps up and by the 1920s we start to have this fluctuation and fits in spurts right that abalone production fishing ramps up there's a decline in the population there's a decline in the fishery because of slow regrowth rates and impacts on healthy beds and so this boom and bust industry starts to cycle through coastal California and one of the things that I got really interested in was well is there something we can say about the legislation out of Chinese fishermen they spent several decades as the prime fishers of black abalone in California of a slow growing intertidal mollusk right that they were shipping overseas much of it overseas to China so was their legislation out conservation or part of a racist anti-Chinese sediment in California throughout the United States so again the real purposes law is aimed at the Japanese principally who are taking them by the tongue without regard to size removing the meat from the shell in the water and bringing it ashore right so they're trying to circumvent laws conservation laws and they were if California let this industry continue it would have collapsed right well that record of that industry is still on the island so we've measured something like 1400 black abalone shells length measurements and here's the distribution from all those sites around the Channel Islands bear with me a minute the 1910 1911 the minimum size limit was 97 millimeters 9.6 or below this limit the mean is 125.8 millimeters now a juvenile abalone is defined a non-reproductive juvenile abalone as any abalone below 50 millimeters there's only two in all these sites that we've measured .1% are juveniles and only 162 measurements are double the size of the largest juvenile but I say that right I think I did right less than 100 millimeters double size the smallest adult or largest juvenile right does this sound like uh they're over harvesting abalone it doesn't to me right and we can argue why this is and I got a really kind of review on my book that I didn't really agree where I put the story down but one is it could be market right this could be part of the market economy you want large abalone large abalone shells to ship overseas this is also can be conservation right you bypass juveniles and only take adults uh so the juveniles can grow up to be adults as you make those rounds around the island and up and down the coast doesn't matter whether it was market or intentional conservation I don't think it does I think the end product is there was some management whether it was the market that was managing this or Chinese fishermen who are managing this and I have to believe since the uh the market in China was overfished and collapsed for abalone in China they had seen the consequences of that and they were living at a time where they couldn't own land they couldn't work on public projects they couldn't be employed by the state because of all this targeted legislation this was one of the last the fisheries were one of the last places that Chinese immigrants could make a living just makes a lot of sense that they tried to take care of it and tried to maintain that fishery so we can get into all that really interesting but you know I'll do some more to convince you these are the average size of black abalone at Chinese sites again no otters so there's ecological changes that have happened in this historic period compared to the prehistoric but this is the shumash fishery for black abalone and then here are the 1910 to 1911 size restrictions really different right so with otters in the system and with a shumash harvest throughout the Holocene so again this kind of seems like this seems like conservation to me and it seems like there was some work to maintain this fishery and so what was I going to say here oh I was going to say that that again that the state and the federal government pitched this as something they had to do to protect and maintain abalone fisheries in California and because they didn't their laws, their size restrictions, their bag limits their closures during seasons would help maintain a healthy abalone fishery into the future right and so we can look at sort of that it doesn't seem to be the case for a while right Chinese immigrants were were while there was booms and busts once the Chinese immigrants were removed from the fishery the fishery seemed to grow there was a lull as restrictions were put in place and then ramped up again after World War II and a need for meat and canned abalone ramped up but the focus of the industry sort of was on the fishery and red and pink late but what was happening what seemed to be stability in the fishery actually was serial collapse if we look at what was being fished when what we see is that fishermen and generally this new European commercial fishing industry would go after one species when that species was depleted they would change their target to another species to make up that decline and just start adding in until the entire system collapse and just like otters when abalone became harder to get less available the price for abalone as we've tracked in menus just sky rockers right so again bringing this fishery to the absolute brink of collapse by the 1880s and 1890s when withering foot syndrome swept through populations of black abalone and other abalone in California and cause the fundamental collapse or combined with overfishing to cause the fundamental collapse of abalone populations around California and withering foot syndromes a bacterial infection causes the abalone to eat itself fall off the rock and then be consumed by predators or just wither and die and so today if you want to eat abalone at some fancy restaurant here in San Francisco you're not eating wild abalone you're eating abalone from one of about a dozen abalone farms where they grow abalone intakes generally red abalone along the central California coast and so in 1993 because of the collapse of California abalone and black in particular all commercial and sport fishing of black abalone was closed right and it was listed as a species of concern and after 20 years of management protection, no fishing and very little predation by otters because they haven't re-established and much of their range throughout California things have only gotten worse and we've upgraded black abalone from a species of concern to endanger and if you know anything about the ESA that's really hard to do things have to be really bad so 20 plus years of management and things have only gotten worse well a part of the management plan it's sort of a three pronged approach to help abalone recovery but one of the primary ways that California fishing game is trying to help abalone recover in California is to receive populations which means you grow millions of juvenile abalone intakes you take them out to locations and you receive them along rocky intertidal shores where they might take hold and then build populations over wider space right and through time and into these optimal habitats and in the California fishing game plan this is what they listed one of the best places to do this for black abalone is on the Channel Islands and they identified 100% of Miguel 60% was 100 Anacapa and here are all the numbers of these shorelines as prime black abalone optimal habitat and my thought was can't we do better than this 100% of the shoreline on San Miguel is great for abalone receding black abalone receding is there something the archeological record can tell us about how to better manage populations and rebuild this fishery well part of the problem that I see in many marine ecologists have pointed out for a couple decades now is that we tend to base our management in marine systems and fisheries on records that only go back 50 maybe 100 years but recent records right because of the quality of data because of the resolution because of the new standards but it tends to be based on records that already have seen exceptional exploitation by commercial fisheries and here this grainy photo right out of the California fishing game management plan this is kind of how they're basing it on right this is the record of dive harvest from 1950 to 1993 along the Channel Islands showing Miguel was a great place and then these other places as we go so they base it on where stuff was in the mid 20th century after at least 100 years of commercial exploitation of the river fishing so here it is there's the dive harvest on 1950 to 1993 but again what if we put the archeological record on top of this so we look at shumash fishing for black abalone well we get we just kind of set up some standard of okay what archeological sites have 10% black abalone shell in there right here they are 11 to 14% 15 to 25 26 to 80 what does this look like where the modern record of fishing is the archeological record seems to sort of dive with this right we can actually add then the record of Chinese fishing industry on top of this and zero into targets on where abalone has been productive where abalone black abalone fisheries have been productive for 10,000 years so a really simple application I understand this is a totally simple historical ecology application but these areas are places where black abalone have done well for 10,000 years seem to be available to fishers for 10,000 years and places where they've weathered changes in sea surface temperatures from cold to warm temperatures through time so if we're going to recede why not start there the reality is it took me three different journals and five different rounds of reviews to get that paper published right and so there is this disconnect between what ecologists and managers think are good data for restoration and conservation and what historical ecologists think the ways in which can be applied so we have a lot of work to do I guess I'll leave it at that so conclusions this narrative of Chinese abalone fishing in southern California to me it's a broader history of immigrants in this country their struggles, their successes the unique and uncelebrated many times ways and they contributed to our national and in 1950 if any of you remember in 1950 you could go to a burger shack after you've done fishing on the California coast and grab an abalone burger for a couple of bucks until the collapse and the closure, abalone was an emblematic part of this state and that was founded by Chinese immigrants and so the unique ways that they shaped our nation often in the face of racism and anti-immigration sentiments and the story continues our national debate has shifted a little bit recently but I'm sure we're going to get back to this debate about immigration we need to start applying these lessons of course the irony of Dennis Kearney and his working men's group is that just three decades prior five decades prior you could find signs in local businesses that said Nina no Irish need apply they were the immigrant enemies to this country and his ancestors he was the immigrant enemy and it just shifted to Chinese immigrants by the 1850s and the story continues so the key to restoring these degraded ecosystems saving abalone and other fisheries may be by looking to the past there are lessons that we can learn from the past they can often be very simple and very straight forward if we're willing to pay attention archaeology matters history matters not just because it's interesting stories about what happened to the past but they tell us about why we are at the place we are today and where we want to go in the future and still we base our restoration science on this country on the best available science we are mandated to apply the best available science nowhere is archaeology listed as part of the best available science for conservation management in this country and that needs to change alright thanks I'll take any questions yes that was fantastic I will forward to your later plan to ask any questions but just one thing in terms of representation of the opium some things that struck me listening to your talk is how much what happens stress injuries before probably salt water there's probably more than just a recreational aspect absolutely there's great you do such a wonderful talk about the visualized context and opium becomes one of those people think yeah people grab on to that and think oh these are they demonize this this is an addiction focusing on the sort of the emotional aspect of the opium yeah I'm sorry I didn't cover that I do cover that in my book that it is opium I mean it was a way to relieve the stresses we're having a massive right and we do that today in a different form right we do that today in a different form and in fact like Euro America at the same time was consuming more opiates than immigrant Chinese communities were it was just in different forms and these like medicines and right that were filled with opiates absolutely yes thank you associate certain remains with traditional practices and in California that's going to be applied to all of these Chinese sites I don't know this but is there anything about abalone harvesting that would leave a distinct trace it was done in a manner that was practiced by people who were part of the Chinese diaspora as opposed to the later harvesting well that's a great question and unfortunately there's not right there are no butchery marks on abalone shell that would be distinctive and many of these sites are just piles of black abalone like 90% of them 95% of them are just piles of black abalone shell and when I first started publishing about these sites that was one of the reviews that I would often get about how do you know these are Chinese immigrants well one we know because once the Chinese were out of the industry it expanded to other species and black abalone weren't the focus of the harvest and so we know because of that we know their contacts and we know because I did something that I gave a presentation on it at a conference and everyone laughed at me and I laughed at myself but I ran five radiocarbon dates on different sites of these Chinese abalone sites just to show that I wouldn't get a date because they're not old enough to register a radiocarbon date so it didn't produce a date which I was like well there you go they're not Native American and we know they're not post-Chinese because the focus was then on subtitle species diving and in fact that post-Chinese industry really doesn't show up in the archeological record because the shell it was done largely from boats and the shell and the meat were being shipped straight off so it was never cashed on the island anyway so I think we've got that dialed in and it only cost me $1,200 to demonstrate that but it was worth it yes There are conflicts between people who are trying to recede abalone populations and who are trying to enhance California's ecosystem as a kind of two-sided issues yeah I mean absolutely I mean the bigger contention right now is between folks who want to reintroduce and expand sea otter populations and people who want to rebuild the abalone fishery and so I've engaged with managers, I have them on papers I'm tied in with the commercial abalone divers who are really passionate this was their way of life until not very long ago their parents were doing this and they want to see that industry come back and I don't have any easy answers but one of the things that I look at is that the Shumash were able to harvest abalone intensively hunt otters, not drive them to extinction and make that whole system work a completely different marine system that was much healthier so if we get back there I think we can have both we can have abalone we can have healthy kelp forests and we can have otters but we probably can't have a commercial fishery that feeds the world it's probably going to be a local fishery as it was for much of the Holocene and that commercial fishery the fishery that these commercial abalone divers are used to is a historical anomaly it was because otters were driven to extinction it's because people were taken out of the system it was like it's a system of dysfunction and so we have to put it back together and that's going to take a really long time but I think we can do it it can happen and of course it's complicated by rising ocean temperatures acidification and all the problems but I do think that there is a path forward but we need to heed the lessons of history and how we do that thank you thanks