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overing more than 70 percent of our blue planet, the oceans dominate the earth in a variety of ways. With an average depth of almost 4 km, they provide over 99 percent of the habitable space for life on earth (Woodard 2000:31). As human populations have grown exponentially over the past century, and with 60 percent of the world’s population living within 100 km of the coast, many have looked to the oceans as a source of hope and protein to feed the masses. Once thought to be nearly inexhaustible, many global fisheries have collapsed or are severely depleted (Jackson et al. 2001; Pauly et al. 2002; Roberts 2002; Worm et al. 2006). Pollution, habitat loss, global warming, and the introduction of exotic species also take an increasing toll on coastal and pelagic ecosystems (see Carlton et al. 1999; Earle 1995; Ellis 2003; Vitousek et al. 1997:495; Woodard 2000). We are only beginning to understand the larger ecological consequences of such impacts, including the wholesale collapse of many coral reef, kelp forest, estuarine, arctic, benthic, and other ecosystems—foundations of marine productivity that have nurtured human societies for thousands of years. These impacts are now global in scale, but humans have had the heaviest impact on nearshore and coastal areas (0–50 m in depth), substantial impacts on deeper continental shelf habitats (50–200 m), and comparatively less impact on the deeper oceans (Steele 1998). In the last few years, two national commissions have issued reports concluding that the world’s oceans and fisheries are in a state of crisis (Pew Oceans Commission 2003; U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy 2004). The management of fisheries and our understanding of the broader ocean crisis have been hampered by the shallow historical focus of policy makers and resource managers, who have based many decisions on ecological observations that span 10, 20, or 30 years, or on historic catch records that rarely span more than a few additional decades. Just over a decade ago, Daniel Pauly (1995) referred to this problem as the “shifting baselines syndrome,” where fisheries managers use recent historical baselines to manage fisheries that are depleted or collapsed. Such recent historical baselines are often fundamentally flawed because they fail to account for the abundance of key species prior to heavy fishing or hunting by indigenous peoples or early commercial harvests (Dayton et al. 1998; Jackson 1 1 Archaeology, Marine Ecology, and Human Impacts on Marine Environments Jon M. Erlandson and Torben C. Rick C GRBQ335-3427G-C01[01-20]qxd 2/18/08 7:22 AM Page 1 Aptara Inc. 2001; Jackson et al. 2001). Roman and Palumbi (2003) analyzed the DNA of living whales, for instance, and suggested that the original population sizes for some whale species were 10 or more times larger than estimated by the historical records currently used as baselines for restoring and conserving whale populations. A growing number of marine scientists are now calling for fundamental changes in the management of marine fisheries and ecosystems, including much deeper historical analyses that incorporate archaeological and other data sets into the development of better fisheries management plans, ecosystem restoration efforts, and a sustainable oceans policy. An important step forward in this effort was a 2001 article in Science called “Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Marine Ecosystems,” named by Discover magazine as the top science story of the year. In it, Jackson et al. (2001, p. 630) argued that human impacts on marine fisheries began relatively early, but they also recognized that human fishing has evolved through three general (and often overlapping ) historical and geographic stages: (1) aboriginal fisheries confined to “subsistence exploitation of nearshore coastal ecosystems” with “relatively simple watercraft and extractive technologies”; (2) colonial exploitation of coastal and continental shelf ecosystems controlled by “mercantile powers incorporating distant resources into a developing market economy ”; and (3) a global stage marked by “more intense and geographically pervasive exploitation of coastal, shelf, and oceanic fisheries integrated into global patterns of resource consumption .” Within this framework, human impacts on marine fisheries and ecosystems have accelerated through time and expanded geographically as human populations grew, extraction and distribution technologies improved, and increasingly global markets emerged. Here, we argue that management strategies for fisheries and other ocean resources need to consider not just shifting baselines and the historical ecology of marine ecosystems, but the “shifting timelines” that emerge from the knowledge that the history of boats, maritime migrations, and marine fishing and hunting developed considerably earlier than...

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