Native American use of cetaceans in pre-contact Oregon: Biomolecular and taphonomic analyses illuminate human-cetacean relationships: MALDI-TOF data

# Native American use of cetaceans in pre-contact Oregon: Biomolecular and taphonomic analyses illuminate human-cetacean relationships: MALDI-TOF data *** This study characterizes how Native Americans living on the Oregon coast used whales and small cetaceans prior to European contact. We present an original analysis of a large subsample of archaeological cetacean remains from the Palmrose (35CLT47) site and new identifications from the previously analyzed Par-Tee (35CLT20) and Tahkenitch Landing (35DO130) sites. Using zooarchaeological and biomolecular analyses we report species presence and modification patterns to characterize use. Grays (*Eschrichtius robustus*) and humpbacks (*Megaptera novaeangliae*) were the most commonly identified whale species and a preferred source of food, oil, bone for tool manufacture, and possibly ligaments for sinew. Dolphins and porpoises, especially harbor porpoise (*Phocoena phocoena*), were a source of food and possibly bone for tool manufacture. While opportunistic hunting may have occurred, the presence of species such as blue (*Balaenoptera musculus*) and Cuvier’s beaked (*Ziphius cavirostris*) whales suggest collection of beached animals was an important acquisition strategy. Our study demonstrates the value of biomolecular analyses for improved species identifications/understanding of species richness, and the value of zooarchaeological analysis to fully understand dietary and cultural contributions of cetaceans to precontact lifeways on the Oregon coast. ## Description of the Data and file structure This zip file contains raw MALDI-TOF spectra for 158 cetacean bones sampled for ZooMS. Each sample was spotted in triplicate, along with calibration standards, onto a 384 spot Bruker MALDI ground steel target plate using 1 µL of sample and 1 µL of α-cyano-hydroxycinnamic acid matrix. The samples were run on a Bruker ultraflex III MALDI TOF/TOF mass spectrometer with a Nd:YAG smart beam laser University of York in York, UK, and a SNAP averaging algorithm was used to obtain monoiosotopic masses (C 4.9384, N 1.3577, O 1.4773, S 0.0417, H 7.7583). Raw spectral data has been uploaded here for each sample in triplicate. The name of each spectrum contains the date that the MALDI analysis was run, the sample name (e.g., A371) followed by the spot location on the MALDI Plate (e.g., \_A1,\_A4, \_A9). ## Sharing/access Information Links to other publicly accessible locations of the data: None.