The natural setting of Caution Bay: climate, landforms, biota, and environmental zones

In this chapter, we review the present and past environment of Caution Bay set in a broader geographical context, including both terrestrial and marine habitats. Our primary objective is to sketch the general canvas upon which the past 6,000 or so years of local human presence, as represented by the Caution Bay archaeological record, played out. A secondary objective is to document the range of contemporary landforms and explore the spatial distribution and ecological dynamics of the various plant and animal communities that still occupy the present landscape, or did so at the time when Europeans first arrived in the 1870s. Knowledge of the contemporary landscape and its resources represents the starting point for inferring continuities and changes in ways of life for the region's past inhabitants as these are tracked back from the present to the mid-Holocene, and ultimately for understanding the choices people made as they balanced various primary extractive and commercial activities to maintain cultural practices, adopt and develop new ones, survive and prosper. Relationships between people and locales at Caution Bay were, and continue to be, dynamic, with people playing a major role in shaping both the physical and biological landscape, just as the landscape and its resources have influenced the course of human history in this area.