Indigenous communities globally are challenged by threats to heritage resources due to residual effects of colonization, outsider encroachment on traditional spaces, and economic and political inequities. The effects of climate change add another dimension to these challenges, not only by altering familiar ecosystems and landscapes but also through the destruction of Indigenous heritage spaces. The University of Maine's Northeast archaeology program supports Indigenous resilience to climate change through community-engaged approaches to archaeological research. Recent shell heap research at the Holmes Point West site in Machiasport, Maine, exemplifies these efforts by blending archaeological science with service through Passamaquoddy language preservation and community engagement. This article discusses the University of Maine's partnership with the Passamaquoddy Nation and reflects on the nexus of Indigenous archaeology, heritage protection, and climate change resilience.

Coastal shell midden deposits are a quintessential component of the archaeological record on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Despite their importance in informing the cultural and environmental histories of Indigenous peoples, research on shell middens has largely not sought to address the physical extent of these cultural deposits, which requires estimating shape, depth, and volume. Here, we present a new scalable geospatial model, designed to work with legacy survey data, for estimating midden volumes based on applying a regular geometric solid to sites with known extent and depth. We evaluate the accuracy of this technique using percussion core, total station, and lidar data from eight sites in Tseshaht territory on western Vancouver Island and three sites on the north coast of British Columbia (Canada). As part of the evaluation process of our results, we calculate uncertainty using subsurface core depth data and then compare generalized and modeled midden volume estimates. We demonstrate an accurate general model applied at the regional scale across a systematically surveyed landscape. This work presents the first landscape-scale measure of midden extents and volume within our study area, with relevance to historical ecology and settlement patterns.

Shifting from shellfish collecting to fishing as a primary coastal foraging strategy can allow hunter-gatherers to obtain more food and settle in larger populations. On California's northern Channel Islands (NCI), after the development of the single-piece shell fishhook around 2500 cal BP, diet expanded from primarily shellfish to include nearshore fishes in greater numbers. During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (1150–600 cal BP), settlement on the islands condensed to a small number of large coastal villages with high population densities supported largely by nearshore fish species including rockfishes, surfperches, and señoritas. Faunal data from five sites on western Santa Rosa Island (CA-SRI-15, -31, -97, -313, and -333) demonstrate an increase in nearshore fishing through time. We argue that demographic changes that occurred on the northern Channel Islands were accompanied by changes in subsistence strategies that were related in part to risk of failure when attempting to acquire different resources. As population density increased, the low-risk strategy of shellfish harvesting declined in relative importance as a higher-risk strategy of nearshore fishing increased. While multiple simultaneous subsistence strategies are frequently noted among individual hunter-gatherer communities in the ethnographic record, this study provides a framework to observe similar patterns in the archaeological record.