ABSTRACT
This volume grew from a modest project begun in early 1985 and aimed at evaluating prehistoric pinniped (seals and sea lions) zoogeography and exploitation. As I read the available literature on Oregon coast archaeology (it took about three hours to read it all in mid-1985), it became abundantly clear that my modest project had virtually no precedent in the context of Northwest Coast prehistory in general (see Lyman 1988b), and that about all that could be said concerning Oregon coast prehistory in particular was that people had apparently been living there at least during the last 3000 years. For example, in his 1984 review of Oregon prehistory, C. Melvin Aikens (1984:84-85) noted that too few archaeological data were available to assess the impacts of early and middle Holocene sea level rise on the earliest inhabitants of the Oregon coast. According to Aikens, data were also inadequate to allow detailed study of the last 3000 years of human adaptational strategies represented by sites excavated prior to 1984. These observations were surprising to me, as archaeological work had been going on in this region for at least 25 years in a more or less regular fashion; i.e., a site or two had been sampled every year or two for the last 25 years.
