Maryland Indians Enjoyed Crabs Too

Crab feasts are a tradition in Maryland, a true sign of the best of summer. Almost nothing is more traditional than steaming crabs in Old Bay (or the spice mix of your choice), picking them on a picnic table covered with paper, dipping them in melted butter and more Old Bay to eat, accompanied by copious cheap beer (Natty Boh is traditional).

For years it has been thought that Redskins Indians Native American Aborigines did not have a taste for crabs, because archaeological evidence showed little evidence for crabs, but huge mounds of oyster shells, called middens near their dwellings.  However, a more careful look shows that they did in fact, eat crabs, and that it's merely an artifact of poor preservation of the shells that led us to believe otherwise.

American Indians, colonists had healthy appetite for crabs, study shows

Native Americans and America’s early colonists ate many more blue crabs than modern researchers previously thought, according to a team of scientists studying crab remains unearthed at archaeological sites in the Chesapeake Bay area.

Because so very few crab shells have been recovered in archaeological digs in the midAtlantic, anthropologists and others have long assumed that crabs were eaten rarely, if at all, by Native Americans or colonists there.

Now a comprehensive review of 93 archaeological sites across the Chesapeake Bay dating back to 1,200 B.C. has turned up evidence showing quite the opposite.

I always found it difficult to believe that native peoples didn't take advantage of a very abundant and easily obtained source of protein. I do wonder what sort of techniques they used to catch large numbers of them?  Baited traps, beach nets, spears? All of the above?

The researchers found little mention in archaeological studies of the remains of blue crabs in the Chesapeake region, says Matt Ogburn, a crab ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and co-author of the paper. “Initially, when we began reviewing Chesapeake sites, we thought we might find 100 or, if lucky, 200 pieces of crab remains and claws to work with. But it turned out there is a lot more out there than we expected,” Ogburn says.

As the paper reveals, by looking into museums and other repositories “we identified and evaluated more than 900 crab remains collected from archaeological sites,” Ogburn adds. The findings ran counter to “the widely held hypothesis that people in the past did not eat crabs,” the scientists say.

Why hasn’t previous research found evidence of crabs? The answer is in the shells. “The blue crab carapace is so fragile and friable that it just doesn’t preserve that well over time,” Rick says. The shell pieces have often gone unrecognized during archaeological digs.

Although we do find fossil crab parts on the beach (including some kind of relative of the Blue Crab), mostly it's just the tips of the claws which are the most heavily calcified part of the shell. I have only heard of reports of more or less intact crab shells being found embedded in the the cliff sediments.

 By measuring the excavated the crab parts–primarily pieces of claws and shell parts–the researchers determined that large crabs were more common in the archaeological collections compared to crabs caught in the Chesapeake today.

“Large crabs overall seem to have been quite a bit more common in prehistoric times than they are today,” Rick says. “That’s what we would expect, but it is good to have scientific confirmation that today’s smaller crabs are in part the result of an intensive fishery that removes large crabs from the population.”

While crabs can live for several years in aquaria, because fishing mortality for crabs in Chesapeake Bay is on the order of 70% annually (meaning 70% of the legal crabs in the Bay are caught and eaten every year), it's a rare crab that exceeds the minimum fishing size long enough to became truly giant crabs. Plus, only the males can become giants, since the females stop shedding and growing after they reach sexual maturity.