It requires the knowledge to read tidal patterns, to locate fish runs, to find sea mammals, to understand weather and current and the specific behavioral patterns of the marine species being exploited.

It requires the tools to catch, process, and preserve food from the sea — hooks, nets or weirs for fish, harpoons or other implements for sea mammals, shellfish tools for the intertidal zones.

The existence of all of these capabilities in the early coastal peoples of the Northwest Coast is a matter of considerable archaeological and scholarly interest.

The conventional assumption in much of twentieth-century archaeology was that sophisticated maritime adaptation — with its requirement for watercraft, for specialized marine technology, and for the specific knowledge needed to exploit offshore marine resources — was a relatively late development in human prehistory.

Under the older models, early Americans were primarily terrestrial hunters who only gradually developed coastal adaptations.