A True Canadian Fish Story: Archaeological Food for Thought William A. Fox July, 1982 It was one of those typical July days in southern Ontario - a sultry heat, only relieved by cool lake breezes as Dr. Michael Spence and I headed out on Long Point Bay with Corporal Varden and Constable McCallum of the Ontario Provincial Police, Norfolk Detachment (Fox 1982:12). The previous October, the London Office of the Ministry of Culture and Recreation had received yet another shipment of unidentified human bone from the office of the Provincial Forensic Pathologist in Toronto. As it seemed likely that the remains were of First Nations individuals, Chief Wellington Staats of Six Nations had been contacted and consulted as to process. Little did we realize that this would be the beginning of a multi-year program of site survey and rescue excavation activities on Long Point (Fox 1986, MacDonald 1986, Fox and Molto 1994). The previous July, a fishing party from Buffalo, NY had stumbled upon a human skull and reported the occurrence to Con. McCallum. As our boat rounded Pottohawk Point and headed to the discovery site, sparsely vegetated dunes and sand beaches stretched before us . Gliding into the warm shallows, we disembarked to begin our investigation. Dark organic layering was immediately evident in the eroding face of a low dune surmounted by a lone pine tree.  Soon we found notched pebble net sinkers  flint flakes and a flint knife, pottery cooking vessel fragments and abundant fish bone.  We made a tape and compass sketch map and recorded several bank profiles. Profile 1 documented what appeared to be a pit feature extending 17cm below the bottom of a black surficial stratum, some 17 to 20 cm in thickness. No human remains were discovered along the exposed bank, although a few skeletal elements were recovered from under the sand just off shore (Molto 1983) The ceramics suggested that this fishing camp dated to about 1000-1200 years ago. But, perhaps the most impressive aspect of the site was the abundance and excellent preservation of the fish bone. Fully articulated vertebral columns exposed in the bank! In my twenty years of Ontario field experience, I had never seen anything like this. We left the Varden site with mixed feelings later that afternoon. No intact burials had been found, and it appeared likely that any further human remains would be discovered only in a disturbed context in the lake shallows. On the other hand, we had documented the first archaeological site located on Long Point - an 1100 year old encampment remarkably near the present tip of the point. This raised some interesting questions concerning the genesis and rate of growth of Long Point itself. But the question most begging for an answer was, why were those people discarding virtually intact fish of a fairly large size on this site? Were they filleting these fish? Exactly what species were they? Rosemary Prevec (1983) was able to supply some of the answers in her faunal report. Rosemary’s analysis of the 237 faunal elements recovered during our investigation indicated that a little over 70% derived from fish. This was no surprise. The surprise was the fact that over 97% of the identified fish bone were from burbot - a species which prefers a cold water habitat! Burbot are members of the cod family - Gadidae and have a circumpolar distribution (Scott and Crossman 1973:640) . They are known also as eelpout, ling, lawyers (odd, they’re not bottom feeders), loche, and made (in Finland). Long Point Bay is not a noted cold water habitat. What was the answer? The only time that these deep water fish would be available in the Long Point shallows would be when they spawned at night in late March (Clemens 1951). Early spring could be pretty chilly out near the east end of Long Point and travel by (dugout?) canoe at that time might be precarious, yet the evidence for such visits was suggestive, if not convincing. I pictured warmly clothed people in canoes playing out nets by torch light with chilled fingers, and then drawing the nets into shore to expose a writhing mass of fresh water cod on the beach. I "reeled back" to the winter of 1974 in Quetico Provincial Park ; snowshoeing across French Lake on a crisp -30 C. starry night, to find our fishing lines held fast by 3 cm of newly formed ice. That day, we had ventured out on foot and by dog sled to try our luck at catching a meal of lake trout. The exercise had been entertaining, but unproductive. As my axe sliced through the ice to free the first line, it jerked down - there seemed to be a fish on! Soon a fish lay flopping upon the snow - a trout? No, a ling or burbot lay there in all its comparative ugliness! Back into the hole it went. The same scenario was played out hole after hole, until finally the last line had been drawn in to expose....another burbot. Remembering that the Park Naturalist, Shan Walshe, had spoken of the good quality of the meat, I "swallowed my fisherman’s pride" and kept the final fish. It flipped a couple of times at the end of the line and then froze into a gentle arc. Returning to the lodge, I dropped the fish in the stainless steel kitchen sink with a clatter. As the sink filled, the fish thawed and began to swim around! Alas, its life was ended and the filleting completed to expose a gelatinous strip of meat - not the most appetizing sight. So, the Varden site fishermen had been harvesting large numbers of burbot. What could be the attraction, given the relatively low meat to body weight ratio of the species and the likelihood that fishing at the end of Long Point had not been particularly comfortable? Furthermore, burbot meat is generally of lower nutritional value than the flesh of many of the species which could have been harvested along Long Point at warmer times of the year and at sites closer to the mainland. A hundred grams of burbot meat provides only 89.9 calories of food value, as compared to 93.2 calories for walleye, 95.1 for channel catfish and 119.1 calories for the same portion of trout (CNN Food Central WEB site). Could this have been a food source that was only used when the inhabitants of the Long Point area were faced with winter starvation? These fish are relatives of the salt water cod, I mused, and cod liver oil is a highly regarded vitamin A and D source. Perhaps the articulated vertebral columns signaled filleting activity, or perhaps some fish were being gutted for the liver alone. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources have documented the importance of fats and oils (ie. nut oils - Ozker 1982:35-37) in Native diets, particularly over the winter period. Would this have justified the discomforts and potential risks of an early spring trip to the tip of Long Point? I thought this a possibility and suggested it to the faunal analyst (Prevec 1983:4). November, 1997 The gas cans were being topped up in the darkness of a late fall evening, as the whine of snow machines rose from the river below. At this point in the year it was dark in Inuvik  pretty well all day long, and the temperature was a seasonal -35C. With a roar, the convoy of machines and komatiks (sleds) descended the hill to the east channel below. It was a good thing that the group I was with included Gerry Kisoun  and his friends, who had grown up in the Mackenzie delta - one of the largest mazes in the world. We wound our way north in the darkness, ever vigilant for open water. Turning west, we entered Bombardier Channel, then Oniak Channel, Luker Channel, before entering the wide main channel of the Mackenzie River. A few kilometers later, we were stopped at our first fishing spot - not much doing. We moved on to a location along the east side of the channel, just off shore from a small notch in the river bank. This would be a good spot to fish for "loche", I was informed. We chiseled and augured through the relatively shallow 10 - 15 cm of ice to produce four fishing holes about five to ten meters apart and baited our "jiggling" stick lures with jackfish belly meat. Jigging commenced with little result at first. As the hours passed, Gerry’s friend "Buck" Dick was the first to draw in a fish, and then another and another. Gerry was catching them too now, but I was having no luck. Finally, in frustration, I took off my fur mitten and started to jig the line with my bare hand. There was a faint tug, and then a heavy weight as I hauled a 2 kilogram burbot onto the ice. These fish were fat, their smooth distended bodies still smeared with mud, from "bellying up" to the small creek mouth shallows to gorge on jackfish fry. The loche flopped on the ice and after several sharp blows to the head with the jiggling stick, spit out the lure bait and all. It soon froze stiff, joining the growing pile of frozen fish which began to resemble a heap of cordwood. We caught a komatik load of fish before returning to Inuvik. We divided the fish at Gerry’s home. Then he left to distribute most of our catch to Inuvialuit Elders in the community, while I returned home with three large specimens. I cached two fish under the porch (away from the ravens), and brought the third in to thaw and clean. Gerry had suggested a number of ways that the meat could be prepared, noting that the livers were particularly tasty. He said that the meat tasted like rock lobster, and was commonly deep fried. When the obese and ugly loche finally thawed in my kitchen, I could only extract two thin strips of meat from either side of its back. However, my "autopsy" exposed a liver as large as my hand, which I put in the refrigerator in a ziploc bag. A stomach incision produced a veritable explosion of several centimeter long jackfish fry. The battered and fried meat provided a palatable meal, but it didn’t taste much like rock lobster to me! By the next day, several centimeters of oil had accumulated in the bottom of the ziploc bag, clearly indicating how rich these large organs are in oil. My one and only culinary experiment with loche liver produced a rather fishy tomato sauce for a spaghetti dinner! October, 1999 At last years OAS symposium in Waterloo, the experiences and memories described above flooded back as Dr. Ron Williamson and Dr. Susan Pfieffer discussed the potential source of a high nitrogen signature in the analysis of certain human remains from the Moatfield Ossuary in north Toronto (van der Merwe 2000). I happened upon them as they were considering possible fish species, and burbot livers and the Varden site leapt to mind. After all, deeper colder Lake Ontario would be a much more "burbot-friendly" environment and probably supported a large and perhaps more easily accessible population of these fish. Whatever the food source of the nitrogen, it was selectively distributed in the Moatfield population. January, 2000 Returning to my new Parks Canada post in Ucluelet, I began to research this question. Other archaeologists and osteologists were consulted, as well as my library, the Internet and old field notes. I discovered that we had found another site with an unusually high frequency of burbot bone (Prevec 1988), just west of Varden and interestingly, that seemed to be of similar age. Fish bone assemblages from later campsites on Long Point were dominated by shallow water species and spring/summer spawners, such as gar, bowfin, bass, catfish and walleye. This sounded like a more comfortable fishing strategy. An email to Dr. Pfieffer led me to a recent unpublished article on Siberian research and an old acquaintance, Dr. Anne Katzenberg. Her specialty is stable isotope analysis of human remains, as used to determine group diet. She had analyzed the Varden burials and forwarded a copy of her paper (Katzenberg et al. 1995) in which she commented on the anomalously low carbon 13 values for these people. Anne argued that while these people could have grown and eaten corn, they seem to have lived primarily on fish and game and lacked evidence of corn in their diet (Ibid:343). Her analyses were consistent with the archaeological evidence reported by MacDonald (1986). She went on to point out that carnivorous fish (burbot) and especially fat or oil from such fish could reduce the carbon ratios used to identify corn consumption. Yet the nitrogen 15 values for the Varden population are low - lower than would be expected for people eating large quantities of burbot. This observation lead Katzenberg (1995:347) to conclude that burbot may have been used primarily for their oil. The evidence was building for my hypothesis as to why the Varden people ventured out some 30 kilometers into a chilly March Lake Erie to fish. At this point though, there seemed little connection with the nitrogen signature in the Moatfield sub-population. Dr. Katzenberg did provide some other leads concerning nitrogen isotopes and burbot. Hecky and Hesslein’s (1995) analysis for some northwestern Ontario specimens (delta 13 carbon: -25.6 to -24.6 and delta 15 nitrogen: 9.3 to 10.1) compared very well with pike and walleye from the same lake. These top of the food chain predators yield considerably higher nitrogen results for specimens from the western Canadian arctic (Ibid) and Siberia (Katzenberg and Weber 1999; Figure 2) and Dr. Katzenberg warned me that fluctuations in carbon and nitrogen could be due to lake chemistry, season of capture and age of the fish., among other factors. The "jury remains out" concerning the Moatfield question, as there are other potential high nitrogen sources, such as migratory waterfowl (Katzenberg et al. 1995:347). More analyses are required, including livers from burbot populations in Lake Ontario. Much remains to be answered concerning the early spring night fishery on Long Point over a thousand years ago. If the Varden people harvested burbot primarily for their livers - for their nutritional/medicinal value - how did these people learn of the efficacy of these organs? If they were harvesting these fish in the numbers suggested by the archaeological record, could they be eating the entire catch on site? If not, how were they keeping them from decomposing during transport? Were they smoking the livers to preserve them, as is still done in some Scandinavian countries? The early seventeenth century Huron peoples caught fish (Einchataon or Annentrata,on) during the late fall in Georgian Bay, which Steckley (1986) has suggested may have been burbot. They appear to have been brought back to their villages frozen/dried and uneviscerated, cooked whole in their corn soup and then crushed and returned to the soup. This has lead Steckley (Ibid:22) to suggest that the reason for this unusual practice was that the Huron desired the liver of this fish which has "a high nutritional value." The Huron preservation strategy would not have been successful on the Varden site, due to springtime temperatures. It was cold, no doubt, but not that cold. Perhaps, the most perplexing question which remains is why this demanding fishery is not represented on later campsites on Long Point? Is this purely a question of site sampling (no later period early spring sites have been discovered) and, if not, what replaced cod liver oil in the local diet? Finally, have any similar fishing camps been identified elsewhere in the Great Lakes region? They have not, to the author’s knowledge. Perhaps the Varden people were an isolated band of hunter-gatherers-fishers who had decided not to embrace the mainstream transition to corn horticulture, as intimated by Katzenberg et al. (1995). That might explain the genetic homogeneity of the population, as noted by Molto (1983). Acknowledgments While the contents of this narrative are the sole responsibility of the writer, I would like to thank the following individuals for providing information and/or advice on a variety of topics: Nick Adams, Helmut Ebert, Neal Ferris, Jukka Halonen, Anne Katzenberg, Gerry Kisoun, John MacDonald, Suzanne Needs, Susan Pfeiffer, Rosemary Prevec, Mike Spence, Doug Stamm, Peter Timmins, and Ron Williamson. References Clemens, H. P. 1951 The Growth of the Burbot Lota Lota Maculosa (LeSueur) in Lake Erie Transactions of the American Fisheries Society Vol.80 (1950): 163-173. Fox, W.A. 1986 The Culture History of Long Point Studies in Southwestern Ontario Archaeology London Chapter of the Ontario Archaeological Society Occasional Publication No.1: 18-24. 1982 Annual Archaeological Report for Southwestern Ontario The 1982 Season Conducted Under Licence 82-30. Manuscript on file, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Citizenship and Recreation. Toronto. Fox, W.A. and J.E. Molto 1994 The Shaman of Long Point Ontario Archaeology No.57: 23-44. Hecky, R.E. and R.H. Hesslein 1995 Contributions of benthic algae to lake food webs as revealed by stable isotope analysis Journal of the North American Benthological Society 14: 631-653. Katzenberg, M.A. and H.P. Schwarcz, M. Knyf, F.J. Melbye 1995 Stable Isotope Evidence for Maize Horticulture and Paleodiet in Southern Ontario, Canada American Antiquity 60(2): 335-350. Katzenberg, M.A. and A. Weber 1999 Stable Isotope Ecology and Palaeodiet in the Lake Baikal Region of Siberia Journal of Archaeological Science 26: 651-659. MacDonald, J.D. 1986 The Varden Site: A Multi-Component Fishing Station on Long Point, Lake Erie. Manuscript on file, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Citizenship and Recreation. Toronto. Molto, J.E. 1983 The Varden Site: Skeletal Biology. Unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author. Ozker, D. 1982 An Early Woodland Community at the Schultz Site 20SA2 in the Saginaw Valley and the Nature of the Early Woodland Adaptation in the Great Lakes Region Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan Anthropological Paper No.70. Ann Arbor. Prevec, R. 1983 The Varden Site Faunal Report Manuscript on file, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Citizenship and Recreation. London. 1988 The Wooden Duck Site AdHa-17 Faunal Report Manuscript on file, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Citizenship and Recreation. London. Prevec, R. and W.A. Fox 1989 Faunal Remains from the Upper Bluff Pond Site AdHa-7 Include Eggshells KEWA Newsletter of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society 89-7: 2-20. London. Scott, W.B. and E. J. Crossman 1973 Freshwater Fishes of Canada Fisheries Research Board of Canada Bulletin 184 Environment Canada. Ottawa. Steckley, J. 1986 Were Burbot Important to the Huron? Arch Notes 86(1): 19-23, 36. Toronto. Still, L. 1985 The Varden Site Faunal Analysis: A Seasonal Fishing Station on Long Point, Ontario. Manuscript on file, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Citizenship and Recreation. London. Van der Merwe, N. 2000 Nitrogen Analysis of the Moatfield Population in Bones of the Ancestors: The Archaeology and Osteobiography of the Moatfield Ossuary.  Please address any feedback to bill_fox@pch.gc.ca Home