Early California: A killing field

Research shatters utopian myth, finds Indians decimated bird 

"The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface of every bay � in flocks of millions�. When disturbed, they arose to fly. The sound of their wings was like that of distant thunder."

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.

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 concluded that California wasn't always a lush Eden before settlers arrived. Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to local extinction, and wildlife returned to "fabulous abundances" only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s.

Broughton's study of bird bones, published in Ornithological Monographs, mirrors earlier research in which he found that fish such as sturgeon, mammals such as elk, and other wildlife also sustained significant population declines at the hands of ancient Indian hunters.

Biologists long assumed that the abundant wildlife in California some 200 years ago had existed for thousands of years � an assumption "that is ultimately used to make decisions about how to manage and conserve threatened or endangered species," says Broughton, an associate professor of anthropology.

"Since European discovery, California has been viewed by scholars and scientists, as well as the general public � as a kind of utopia or a land of milk and honey, a super-rich natural environment," he says. "This perception has long colored anthropological research on the state's native peoples. The harvesting methods and strategies of native peoples have been suggested to have promoted the apparent superabundance of wildlife, and have been proposed as models for the management of wilderness areas and national parks today." 

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."