People

Dr. Iain McKechnie is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria affiliated with the Hakai Institute and the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. He is a coastal archaeologist interested in how food provides an understanding of human social relations, human-environmental relations, and human-animal relations. He specializes in zooarchaeology (the archaeology of animal bones) and historical ecology (contextualizing modern ecosystem observations with those from well before the 19th or 20th centuries) and conducts research on these issues using archaeological and ecological data from Northwest Coast of North America. He has taught an archaeological field school in Nuu-chah-nulth territories on western Vancouver Island for several years with the support of Tseshaht First Nation and Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.

Current Lab Members

Matt Johnson is a PhD Student who is conducting comparative zooarchaeological and ethnobiological research on bone tools in the coastal and interior regions of the Pacific Northwest.
Dylan Hillis is a PhD Candidate working to contribute to the related Coastal Voices and NSERC RESNET projects. In 2022, Dylan completed a masters on Indigenous fisheries and has previously studied domestic dog diet using stable isotopes.
Zenus Francis is a masters student conducting archaeological research on the scaling of children’s technologies focusing on wetsite material from Ozette.
Kai Muir is masters candidate in UVic’s School for Environmental Studies who is evaluating Pacific herring populations in the Salish Sea to improve historic baselines for this key fishery.

Recent Members

to view recently completed graduate degrees view this link

Fynley Calder-Rasmussen recently completed an honours degree examining Indigenous dispossession in the historic Northern Fur Sealing industry, now pursuing a masters degree in Archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.

Dr. Kristina Barclay (Banting PostDoc, 2022-24) is an ecologist and conservation paleobiologist whose archaeological research focused on sub-lethal predation scars on clams in Tseshaht territory (see her great paper in Biological Conservation). Kristina is currently a co-lead for Canada’s ocean acidification network and works within the Hakai Institute’s ocean observation program.
Robert Gustas (PhD, 2024) is a geospatial archaeologist who completed a dissertation on coastal demography in Barkley Sound and has a background in GIS modelling. Read more about his research here and here.
Kathryn McKenzie (MA, 2024) completed a masters degree on the UVic zooarchaeology comparative collection. Learn more about Kathryn’s research here and about her prestigious ICAZ award HERE.
Luke George is from Tseshaht First Nation and working to pursue masters research on Indigenous fisheries but is currently taking leave to get back to his full time work at North Island College.

Dr. Jasmin Schuster completed a Mitacs post doc in the HECA Lab focused on the marine historical ecology of Indigenous fisheries while also contributing to dive based observations of ReefLife survey and the Hakai Institute’s Kelp node. Dr. Schuster is currently the scientific director of the Kelp Rescue Initiative

Freya Harrison completed honours research and held an NSERC Undergraduate Research Award to pursue research on salmon morphometrics.
Justin Walker was a field school student in 2021 and helped manage the field school material from Keith Island in 2022 as a work study student and is currently working in consulting archaeology.

Alyssa Ball completed a masters on fish scales and ancient eulachon fisheries with support of Wuikinuxv Nation resource stewardship office, Mitacs, and the Hakai Institute. Alyssa also designed the LAB logo for which we are grateful and is a professional consulting archaeologist working for Baseline Archaeological Services.

Katie Dierks completed an undergraduate honours degree, an NSERC Undergraduate Research Award in 2019. Katie conducted research on the osteobiography of a domestic dog from Tseshaht territory in Barkley Sound as part of the Keith Island Archaeological Project and is currently a masters candidate at Simon Fraser University.

Heather Earle completed a masters in resource & environmental management at Simon Fraser University focused on the historical ecology of sea otters, co-supervised by Iain McKechnie & collaborator Anne Salomon. Heather has recently been working with Parks Canada and the Hakai Institute & help produce the amazing SeaGardens website https://www.seagardens.net

Meaghan Efford defended her masters research on the archaeology of gooseneck barnacle harvesting in Nuu-chah-nulth territories. Meaghan completed her PhD at UBC working with Tsleil-Waututh Nation and is now a postdoctoral scholar with UBC’s Institute for Oceans & Fisheries.

Erin Slade completed her MRM thesis on the archaeology of mussel shell size variation in the presence of humans and sea otters co-supervised by Dr. Anne Salomon at SFU. Erin works with Gulf Islands National Park Reserve and was the lead author of this paper in Ecosystems.

Dr. Kira Hoffman is an accomplished dendro-ecologist who was the deserving recipient of the first Bamfield Marine Science Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship (Summer 2018). Dr. Hoffman worked with the BC Ministry of Environment in Northern British Columbia and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo and UBC.

Jacob Salmen-Hartley completed a masters thesis on the archaeology and historical ecology of Pacific halibut fisheries (Aug 2018) and contributed to the Keith island Archaeological Project and the UVic archaeology field school in Barkley Sound and is currently an archaeologist with Parks Canada working in coastal British Columbia.

Arianna Nagle (Honours Student) completed an honours thesis on Indigenous marine conservation and sea urchin size distribution in the archaeological record.

Seonaid Duffield completed a masters thesis (Dec 2017) that explored how vibracoring can be used to better understand Indigenous fisheries on the Central BC coast. She additionally contributed to implementing this approach on western Vancouver Island with generous support from the Hakai Institute and Mitacs.

Kelda Helweg-Larsen conducted her cultural anthropological Masters research with Tseshaht First Nation on western Vancouver Island and participated during 2016 & 2017 UVic field school excavations in the Broken Group.

Paige Lewis conducted zooarchaeological lab research in 2017 as a work-study student including experimenting with methods for preparing specimens for the zooarchaeology comparative collection for which she won an award.

Anne Tuominen (MA, Sheffield) assisted with zooarchaeological research tasks in 2016 and 17 and is now working for the Province of BC.

Friends of the Lab

Denis St. Claire (top), Ian Sellers (top right), Walker Tottman (right in the unit) and many others.

Dr. Angelica Tivoli and Dr. Francisco Zangrando from CONICET in Ushuaia, Argentina who are featured in this incredible long-form science journalism story published by Hakai magazine

Ben Fitzhugh and Katsunori Takase have generously connected me to coastal archaeological research from the other portions of the Pacific Rim for which I am so grateful.