Environmental history of the oceans and seas are daunting topics, either because of the vastness of the oceans and seas, the artificial boundaries, or their seemingly changelessness. Until about 1990, with Arthur McEvoy’s The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and the Law in California Fisheries, 1850-1980, historians largely ignored marine ecosystems as areas of research. Focusing instead on inland fisheries, environmental historians have still had to be “exhorted… to embrace this opportunity” of expanding the discourse of human impacts on marine environments. Scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, and historical ecologists have thus far dominated the production of knowledge concerning historical and current marine ecosystems. In…show more content… Through a compilation of scholars, Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems attempts to show how human disturbance of marine ecosystems in ancient populations. Ranging from Caribbean, North American Pacific, North Atlantic, and Mediterranean, Human Impacts examines archeological and historical ecological data and case studies from “around the world to summarize the history of human coastal occupation, environmental change, and human impacts in their area.” Similarly, in Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems, Jeremy Jackson et al. highlights through paleoecological, archeological, and historical data that aboriginals extensively fished coastal ecosystems, resulting in damaged ecosystems. Through the use of archeological and historical data, these scholars challenge the “supposedly superior ecological wisdom of non-Western and precolonial societies.” These scholars highlight the damages and exploitation of early human societies on marine ecosystems. However, the data surrounding aboriginal impacts on early marine ecosystems is scarce resulting in fewer scholarly articles on the subject.
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