Dried or smoked fish, including salmon, could certainly be transported inland and eaten by interior people.

But the level of marine dietary signal in his long-term tissue isotopes suggests more than occasional consumption of traded dried fish.

It suggests a person who had spent significant time in a coastal or coast-influenced dietary environment — either on the coast itself or in a community with extensive regular access to marine food.

The most parsimonious interpretation of all the evidence — the clothing, the isotopes, the stomach contents, the glacier crossing — is of a person whose life spanned the coast-interior divide in some meaningful way, who was familiar with both worlds, and who was making a crossing of the mountains that, for reasons we cannot recover, did not end as expected.

The Craft Of Woven Hats