Archaeological dig reveals participants in California’s Gold Rush dined on salted Atlantic cod

It turns out San Francisco has been a destination for lovers of imported delicacies since its earliest Gold Rush days. According to results published recently in the peer-reviewed Journal of Anthropological Research, an excavation at Thompson’s Cove in San Francisco has shown “Atlantic cod were imported during the 1850s, likely as a (largely) deboned, dried and salted product from the East Coast of the United States.”

The results underscore the importance of global maritime trade in northern California during the Gold Rush. Co-author Brittany Bingham, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Kansas, performed genetic analysis on 18 cod bones recovered from Thompson’s Cove to determine if they came from cod caught in the deep nearby waters of the Pacific or were shipped in packages by boat from Atlantic fisheries. Her results on five specimens for ancient DNA show Atlantic cod were imported during the debut of the Gold Rush.

Bingham said bones tend to be better preserved and more suitable for analysis than other materials left behind from the rapid surge in San Francisco’s population. (In the first year of the Gold Rush, between 1848-49, the area’s 800 residents quickly swelled to more than 20,000.)

“Bones preserve better than other things that don’t last in the archaeological record as well,” she said. “You won’t get a quality DNA sample from every bone — some are burned, and soil and other factors can affect preservation, so we typically check for DNA and determine what we’re looking at. But often people move bones elsewhere and maybe they’re thrown in a different place than the rest of the bones, so you don’t have the whole specimen to look at. That’s where people like me come into play, and we’ll take the one tiny piece of bone that might have been found and figure out what it actually came from.”

The results of Bingham’s analysis were among the first archaeological results to confirm findings from historical newspapers and invoices: The early history of San Francisco included the importation of a wide range of fish and seafood to support the population boom.

The project came about when the Musto Building built-in 1907 at Thompson’s Cove — where the city was first settled — undertook a mandatory retrofitting to be more resilient to earthquakes, triggering a California compliance law requiring archaeological work in conjunction with construction at the site. Today, the building is home to a private social club.

Kale Bruner, who earned her doctorate in anthropology at KU, worked on the Thompson’s Cove site as construction took place. Today, Bruner serves as a research associate at the Museum of the Aleutians.

“Compliance work is challenging in a lot of ways because you don’t really get a lot of control over the excavations, and this case was kind of an extreme example of that — the fieldwork conditions were overwhelming — and I was the only archaeologist on-site,” Bruner said. “They were fortunately only excavating dirt in one location at a time, so I only had one piece of machinery to be watching, but we were hitting archaeologically significant material constantly. It was two years essentially of monitoring that kind of activity and documenting as rapidly as possible everything that was being uncovered.”

Aside from evidence of Atlantic cod, the authors reported about 8,000 total specimens or fragments of animal bone, and a total number of artefacts collected that numbered nearly 70,000. The work will yield more academic papers on the historical significance of the site.

Lead author Cyler Conrad, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and archaeologist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, has published other findings from work at Thompson’s Cove, including evidence of a California hide and tallow trade, eating of wild game, hunting of ducks and geese, and even importation of Galapagos tortoise.

He described the Gold Rush era as exciting and chaotic, a time that in some ways mirrored the supply chain problems plaguing the world in the COVID-19 era.

“During the Gold Rush, it took many months for vessels to arrive in San Francisco, so often when you needed things is not when they would arrive, and when things would arrive, they were often not needed anymore,” Conrad said. “You find these descriptions of San Francisco as this kind of a muddy mess, a kind of a tent city where there were shacks built upon shacks all the way up until the shoreline, just stacked with crates and boxes.

Even at Thompson’s Cove, I think Kale excavated several essentially intact crates of frying pans and shovelheads. You can imagine shiploads of shovels might arrive, but maybe everyone had a shovel already or maybe it was winter, and no one was in the goldfields and you have all this material that accumulates right along the shoreline — but that was convenient for our work.”

Conrad said the work to determine the Atlantic origins of cod bones found at the site was a significant contribution to understanding maritime trade of the era when Atlantic cod was either shipped by boat all the way around Cape Horn — or shipped to Panama, then hauled across the isthmus, before being shipped up to the Northern California goldfields.

“We have this really fascinating aggregation of material, and it’s remarkable we only found 18 bones we can identify to the genus of cod from the Atlantic,” he said. “Brittany’s DNA work was critical for this because it’s difficult to distinguish between bones of Atlantic versus Pacific cod — their bone morphology is virtually the same. We’ve been able to tie the DNA from Brittany’s work with some slight differences in the very far tail vertebrae. If you think how cod was prepped and salted, they removed almost all bones, except for the very last few bones. Perhaps this was rapidly prepared and exported cod from the East Coast, because of this rush to the goldfields and demand for food.

Perhaps they were just kind of shipping out whatever they could. There are some interesting details in the cod bones, and we would never have been able to answer these questions without DNA — and it really supports this identification that, yes, these are Atlantic cod — and that opens up a whole new window into this human experience.”

The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. The university’s mission is to lift students and society by educating leaders, building healthy communities and making discoveries that change the world. The KU News Service is the central public relations office for the Lawrence campus.

Massive 1,100 Year Old Maya Site Discovered In Georgia’s Mountains

In Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, the Mayans constructed astonishing temples – but now some assume that the ancient people fled their dissolving civilization and ended up in Georgia.

A 1,100-year-old archaeological site is believed by the historian and architect Richard Thornton to show that Mayan refugees fled Central America and ended up near Blairsville in the North Georgian mountains.

His amazing theory is based on the discovery of 300 to 500 rock terraces and mounds that date to 900AD on the side of the Brasstown Bald mountain – around the time the Mayans started to die out.

Mr Thornton’s blockbuster theory revolves around the area near Brasstown Bald potentially being the ‘fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540’. He described it as ‘certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

The Mayans died out around 900AD for reasons still debated by scholars – although drought, overpopulation and war are the most popular theories, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The remains were first found by retired engineer Carey Waldrip when he went walking in the area in the 1990s. Archaeologist Johannes Loubser excavated part of the site and wrote a report about it in 2010, but does not believe the rock terraces are Mayan.

‘I think that (Mr Thornton) selectively presents the evidence,’ Mr Loubser told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. ‘But he’s a better marketer than I and other archaeologists are.’

Mr Loubser, who excavated a rock wall and small mound, added that claims like this must be backed up with ‘hard evidence’ because of the various conflicting opinions in the archaeological world.’

Mr Loubser believes the structures could have been built by the Cherokee Indians or an earlier tribe between 800AD and 1100AD. He stopped digging because he realized the site could be a grave.

Still, Mr Thornton claims early maps of the location named two villages ‘Itsate’, which was how Itza Mayans described themselves. The terrace structures and dates helped him reach his conclusion.

‘It was commonplace for the Itza Maya to sculpt a hill into a pentagonal mound,’ he argues. ‘There are dozens of such structures in Central America.’

But not everyone is impressed by Mr Thornton’s theory. He cited University of Georgia archaeology professor Mark Williams in an article on Examiner.com.

‘I am the archaeologist Mark Williams mentioned in this article,’ Professor Williams said on Facebook. ‘This is total and complete bunk. There is no evidence of Maya in Georgia. Move along now.’

‘The sites are certainly those of Native Americans of prehistoric Georgia,’ Professor Williams told ABC News. ‘Wild theories are not new, but the web simply spreads them faster than ever.’

Mr Thornton wasn’t bothered by the ensuing debate, in fact, that’s exactly what he wanted. ‘I’m not an archaeologist. I’m a big picture man,’ said Mr Thorton to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. ‘We’re hoping this article stirs up some interest. I was just trying to get the archaeologists to work some more on the site and they come back snapping like mad dogs.’

He works with a company called His pared his map of the Georgia site, it reminded him of other Mayan works. ‘It’s identical to sites in Belize,’ he argued.

The Mayans have been under intense scrutiny over the past few years as rumours abound about their mysterious 5,125-year calendar allegedly predicting the apocalypse on December 21 2012.

But various experts have spoken out against Doomsday, including Mexico’s ‘Grand Warlock’ Antonio Vazquez, to say that the Mayan calendar instead will just reset and a new time-span will begin.