Far from shore: archaeology of seafood canneries and offshore commercial fishing

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a transformative time for ocean ecosystems, marked by overfishing, habitat degradation, and a series of other anthropogenic perturbations. In the northeast Pacific, the creation of canneries from Alaska to Mexico drove commercial fisheries for tuna, salmon, sardines, and other fishes by opening new markets around the world and fishing for or importing fishes from equally distant places. Here, we synthesize archaeological investigations of nineteenth and twentieth century offshore capitalist fishing industries in the northeast Pacific, using the region's coastal canneries to illustrate emerging opportunities in environmental archaeology. Archaeology has an important role to play in research on the historical ecology of the origins of offshore capitalist commercial fishing and connections to the global acceleration of the mid twentieth century, especially through interdisciplinary research that integrates archaeology, historical records, and archaeological/historical museum specimens.