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What is a Weir?
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Throughout history, humans have settled along oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, and other bodies of water. A major driving force behind this is the immense opportunity that these bodies provide as a source of food, as well as the other advantages of transportation, drinking water, and other water-based resources that enhance and support human life.
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One particular kind of body of water, the estuary, is an especially resource-rich place where all sorts of freshwater, salt-water, terrestrial, and other resources are in close proximity to one-another, making them excellent places for people to settle. More specifically, estuaries are where the freshwaters of rivers and streams flow into the salt-water of the ocean. An excellent way to extract many of the water-based food sources in these estuaries is called a weir.
Weirs, or fish weirs, have been used for thousands of years by peoples all around the globe. They rely on the movement of water currents to funnel fish and other marine species into traps, fences, or baskets, depending on the design. They are woven variously of sticks or reeds, or constructed out of stones, sometimes incorporating many kinds of material in their construction. On the southern Oregon coast, in its many estuarine environments, fish weirs were a very important part of food procurement.
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The weir depicted in this illustration is a kind of tidal weir. Tidal weirs rely on the action of the tides, raising and lowering the water levels in the estuary, to drive fish into areas where they are easily caught, or directly into baskets. These weirs were often permanent, and were used year-round to exploit many different species of fish throughout their spawning cycles. These weirs, often positioned on the periphery of larger estuaries in smaller tidal channels or sloughs, were used in conjunction with one-another, larger, often more temporary riverine weirs, hunting of terrestrial animals, and shellfish collection to support communities that developed alone these resource-rich areas.
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