The possible roles of people in ecosystems include those of ecosystem engineers, more ordinary members of food webs with larger or smaller influence, or even relatively passive responders to ecosystem change that is driven primarily by climate or other external factors. We examined the ecosystem roles of the Aleut, who have inhabited the Lower Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Island region for millennia and provide an example of a maritime hunter-gatherer culture that apparently had relatively sustainable patterns of culture and habitation, with a local economy based on ecosystem goods and services. We elucidated the direct and indirect interactions of the Aleut and their biotic resources during the course of their 6000+ year habitation of Sanak Island, AK, using ancient (archaeological), historic, and contemporary data. We focus on the ecology of the Aleut, the mechanisms through which they modified the structure and dynamics of their food webs, and the consequences of these interactions for persistence of the Aleut and the larger food webs of the region.

Results/Conclusions

The Aleut exerted significant controls over the landscapes and food webs that sustained them, effects that may be as influential as those that are now conventionally understood to result from agricultural and industrial societies. The ecological effects of the past and current habitation of Sanak Island remain prominent in contemporary food webs. Changes in the spatial occurrence and abundance of key resource species have had prominent influences on the dynamics of the Aleut-natural resource interaction web, and the landscape distributions of species and food- webs show strong influence of the people who have inhabited the region. Major players in past and current food webs that were strongly directly influenced by interactions with the Aleut include salmonids, sea mammals, culturally significant plants, soil microbiota, birds, and foxes and cows, the latter two being species that provided historic or contemporary resource-economic alternatives to the marine biota that were and are the mainstay resource economy of the Aleut.