California Coast and Channel Islands Archaeology

Abstract:  The Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) is the premier English historical society when it comes to the Age of Discovery.  Its 2 volume Hakluyt Handbook is a comprehensive guide, first proposed by Dr. R. A. Skelton and Professor D. B. Quinn, consisting of materials and the sources of Richard Hakluyt’s nearly 300 volumes of primary records regarding the Age of Discovery voyages, travels and other geographical material.  In the early 1960’s the Council of the Society set up a committee to work on the project and began enlisting contributors for the guide. After years of hard work by its members, The Hakluyt Handbook was completed and finally published in 1974. The Handbook Preface by C. F. Beckingham, Hakluyt Society President, stated that there had never been a comprehensive study of Rickard Hakluyt’s works along with the background of his sources.  Beckingham’s hope was that the correlation between overlapping disciplines of the handbook be used by various scholars would give rise to further study.  This is one such study.

The Franciscan missions of California have long proven a symbol for polarized portrayals of the Hispanic colonization of the region. Whether by virtue of the Spanish colonial legacy in other areas of the Americas or the founding narratives of the US as the world's first Protestant nation, Hispanic contributions have long been deemed secondary to an authentic American history. Despite recent efforts to interrogate the archaeology, ethnohistory, and social history of the missions, Castillo fails at all levels of analysis to acknowledge contemporary scholarship in an effort to vilify California's founding communities. This work is rife with politicized misinformation; the conflation of ethnohistorical traditions, chronologies, and cultures; an ethnocentric narrative of Hispanic, Californio, and, thereby, Latino traditions; and specious characterizations of indigenous peoples. The author's narrative of victimization reduces American Indians to helpless pawns in their own destruction while demonizing those Indian alcaldes or magistrates charged with maintaining order and administering corporal punishment. Ultimately, Castillo's narrative only further diminishes the Hispanic and indigenous heritage of California by constructing yet another pulp fiction borne of a thorny thicket of contradictory claims, illogical historical constructs, and anti­Hispanic/Catholic perspectives best left to blog posts.

In 1877, Paul Schumacher shipped what he called a “treasure” of archaeological materials to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Known as “the Schumacher Collection,” the archaeological assemblage contains an unusually large quantity of Euro-American manufactured materials from human burials at the Tongva Village of Nájquqar (CA-SCaI-39) on Pimu Santa Catalina Island, California. Previous attempts at analyzing these rare cultural materials did not include interpretations of their meanings within the context of ethnohistorical and ethnographical information in California. Multiple lines of evidence from documentary sources and archaeological analysis suggest that the Tongva islanders, known ethnographically as the Pimu Tongva people, opportunistically acquired trade goods from Euro-American seafarers at the time of “first contact” in 1542 until their final removal from the island sometime after 1820. The ways in which the Pimu Tongva meaningfully integrated introduced materials into pre-existing cultural practices, reveal how a coastal Californian group continued to craft their own identity in the face of invasion.

Systematic radiocarbon dating of coastal shell middens is a useful method for obtaining basic chronological information about archaeological sites that are threatened by coastal erosion, or for conducting reconnaissance in an area where little is known about the settlement history. This study focuses on radiocarbon dating of archaeological sites across the marine terrace adjacent to Carrington Point, Santa Rosa Island, California. This area has seen limited archaeological research compared to other portions of the island. Results suggest that settlement of this area was not constrained by known environmental or cultural patterns. When compared to other areas where similar systematic radiocarbon dating has been performed, no single factor can explain settlement decisions throughout the Northern Channel Islands. Although resource use at a single site may be heavily determined by environmental factors and regional settlement patterns are influenced by broad cultural trends, midscale patterns may also be contingent on historical patterns or nearby land use. Settlement of marginal areas such as the Carrington Point terrace represents a steady, consistent background to land use in more productive parts of the Northern Channel Islands.

Let me tell you a story about an African Queen that ruled the West Coast of the United States of America. They call her Queen Calafia. In the continental U.S., there were Africans who came before slavery and have been there for thousands of years, way before Christopher Columbus was even born. In many cases, these Blacks and other indigenous nations established thriving civilizations in ancient America. Queen Calafia and the California Blacks were one of these ancient Black nations. And I aim to prove that the legends about her, the real Wonder woman, are based on Amazonian women living on the West Coast of America.

The Coastal Chumash resided in permanent towns supplied by an economy of hunting, gathering and fishing practiced in a region possessing high ecological diversity. An elaborate exchange system trading food, raw resources and manufactured goods was developed most likely to deal with the occasionally unpredictable environment. Anthropologists argue that it was the environmental productivity of the region where Chumash peoples resided which contributed to higher populations and greater sociopolitical complexity than that of other hunter-gatherer societies. The Burton Mound site, CA-SBA-28, was consistently documented by the Spanish expeditions of the 16th-19th centuries as being adjacent to a principal town of the Barbareño Chumash. As a result of historic and modern construction, this important site and many others in the Santa Barbara Channel Region either no longer exist or are inaccessible. Thus, the collections resulting from three excavations at CA-SBA-28 are of considerable significance. Only one of the collections has been the subject of a major publication (Harrington 1928). In 1969, Dr. Claude Warren directed excavations of the site prior to pending construction. The faunal remains recovered from the 1969 excavation are studied for the first time to investigate Coastal Chumash subsistence during phases of the Early and Middle periods for which little is known. Analysis of the faunal assemblage provides insights into timing and use of Chumash watercraft, and how climatic uncertainty may have affected subsistence and settlement patterns.

Point Bennett, on western San Miguel Island, California, was an important location for sea mammal hunting through time. We use stable oxygen isotopic (δ 18 O) measurements from California mussel (Mytilus californianus) shells to reconstruct a seasonal pattern of mussel harvesting by the human occupants of Point Bennett during three time intervals dated to the middle (~7,550 – 3,600 cal B.P.; CA-SMI-528, Stratum 3) and late (after ~3,600 cal B.P.; CA-SMI-528, Stratum 1; CA-SMI-602) Holocene. During both periods of occupation at CA-SMI-528, mussel harvesting was primarily during the spring, coincident with onshore sea mammal breeding. This suggests a seasonal pattern of site occupation. At CA-SMI-602, mussel harvesting primarily occurred during the summer and fall. This is opposite when sea mammals are present in highest densities, suggesting year-round occupation. This shows how seasonality of mussel harvesting can be used alongside other indicators like seasonal availability of sea mammals to understand broader patterns of human mobility.

Historical, meteorological, archaeological, and geological evidence support detailed reconstructions of how Spanish land-use practices affected the environment around the inland Chumash village of Talepop in the Santa Monica Mountains of southern California. Initiation of Spanish farming and grazing around Talepop in 1801 followed by droughts between 1807 and 1810 defoliated the hillsides and triggered dustbowl-like conditions. Heavy rains in 1811 eroded the barren hills leading to massive floods in the valleys below. Chumash at Talepop adjusted to Spanish occupation by incorporating non-native plants and animals into their diet, but ultimately the changes overwhelmed them, and they abandoned the village.

Francis Drake was the only explorer of the 16th and 17th century to sail further than 42½° N latitude along the Pacific coast of North America. This article discusses the justification of Phillip A. Costaggini's Oregon State Master's thesis "Survey of Artifacts at Neahkahnie Mountain Oregon" that Francis Drake performed a survey to prove England's land claim using stone markers and cairns on Neahkahnie Mountain, Oregon.  www.FortNehalem.net

Sequential models can be used to connect raw material culture to broader social, economic, and religious processes. The present study explores an asphaltum (bitumen) production sequence at Tule Creek Village, CA-SNI-25, a large Late Holocene site on San Nicolas Island, California. Three conclusions have been drawn from this investigation: (1) island populations used asphaltum for a variety of activities that supported everyday needs, (2) male and female tasks were spatially unsegregated, and (3) everyday asphaltum use appears in the same space as ceremonial activities, suggesting spiritual and secular realms were intricately linked. The asphaltum production sequence model built and applied here can be used to address a variety of broad anthropological questions and is applicable in regions that contain naturally occurring seeps across the globe.

This report presents the results of the burial and archaeological data recovery program conducted within a portion of site CA-SCL-128 [Thámien Rúmmeytak [Thámien (Guadalupe) River Site], a Late Middle Period-to-Late Period Ancestral Muwekma Ohlone Cemetery located at 282 Almaden Boulevard, City of San Jose, Santa Clara County, California. The recovered burial was inadvertently discovered on January 24, 2012 by a construction crew excavating a trench and footings for a concrete overhang canopy at the rear entrance to the newly renovated Hyatt Place Hotel. The Hyatt Place Hotel, previously known as the Holiday Inn, which was originally constructed in 1977 and was the location of a major prehistoric cemetery/residential village locality historically recorded as CA-SCL-128 (The Holiday Inn Site).

Institutionalized differences in social status developed on California’s northern Channel Islands from the Late Middle (A.D. 650-1150) to Late (A.D. 1300-1782) periods. This is associated with the proliferation of sedentary communities along the coasts of these islands and a number of important socioeco- nomic changes, including a greater emphasis on fishing and the production of non-food craft items. These changes were particularly rapid during the Middle to Late Period Transition (MLT; A.D. 1150-1300) and partly attributed to significant environmental change during this interval. Population-resource imbalances caused by decreased marine productivity, drought, or some combination of the two have been suggested as possible environmental triggers for the sociopolitical changes evident in the archaeological record at this time. Shell midden deposits at CA-SRI-15 provide a unique opportunity to test whether elevated sea surface temperature (SST) reduced marine productivity during the MLT and contributed to these population resource imbalances. This is because the site was occupied relatively continuously from the Late Middle Period through the Late Period. Faunal records and associated oxygen isotopic data from the site do not support the hypothesis that increased SST reduced marine productivity during the MLT.

We use data on site distributions, chronology, and artifact assemblages from a large, flat upland landscape on Santa Rosa Island to better understand the relationship between coastal and interior settlement patterns on California's northern Channel Islands. This region, Pocket Field, was an important hub of occupation during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene (before 7550 cal BP) and throughout the late Holocene (3600-168 cal BP). A radiocarbon chronology for the region suggests that settlement patterns are consistent with what has been observed in coastal locations, with an increase in site density throughout the late Holocene. Groundstone is an important component of the late Holocene archaeological record, although it decreases in importance following the droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA; 1150-600 cal BP). Olivella biplicata shell bead production at dense midden sites indicates that occupation of the region was not just for access to terrestrial resources. An increase in sites with projectile points during the MCA may reflect an increase in interpersonal violence and indicate that increasing territoriality that occurred on the coast may have extended into the island interior. Our study demonstrates that interior sites were integral components of island settlement and subsistence patterns, even when diet is heavily marine-oriented.

Island ecosystems and peoples face uncertain futures in the wake of predicted climate change, sea level rise, and habitat alteration in the decades and centuries to come. Archeological and paleoecological records provide important context for understanding modern environmental and sociopolitical developments on islands. We review and analyze human interactions with island ecosystems in Polynesia, the Caribbean, and California during the last several millennia. Our analysis demonstrates that human impacts on island ecosystems and cases of highly managed anthropogenic landscapes extend deep in the past, often beginning at initial settlement. There are important issues of scale and island physical characteristics, however, that make human ecodynamics on islands variable through space and time. These data demonstrate that current environmental problems have their roots in deeper time and suggest that the Anthropocene likely began by the onset of the Holocene, if not earlier.

Twelve flotation samples collected from a previously excavated unit on San Nicolas Island in 1995, but unreported until now, were extremely productive yielding an abundance of charred seeds, geophyte remains, wood charcoal, and faunal remains. These are quite similar to other reported datasets from the Channel Islands and mainland southern California.

My first new archaeobotany report in 18 years.

We estimate seasonality of shellfish harvest and site occupation for four Early Holocene shell middens on California’s San Miguel Island using a dataset of 449 δ18O measurements from 84 mussel shells (Mytilus californianus). Seasonality was assigned to prehistoric mussels using paleo sea-surface temperature (PSST) estimates from isotopic data obtained across full shell profiles. The results suggest that PSSTs around San Miguel Island were generally cooler between
~10,000–8600 calBP and that mussels were harvested in a range of water temperatures which suggest a mix of seasonal
and year round harvesting at the four sites. Two substantial shell middens dated to ~10,000 and ~9000 calBP appear to
have been residential basecamps where Paleocoastal peoples harvested shellfish during all four seasons. These data suggest
that Early Holocene peoples occupied the Channel Islands year round and highlight the importance of stable isotope
analysis of marine shells for helping evaluate human settlement and subsistence strategies along the Pacific Coast.

Fresh water availability was an important variable that influenced prehistoric human settlement on California's northern Channel Islands. Previous attempts to understand settlement on the islands use watershed size as a proxy for water at canyon mouths. In semi-arid regions, this approach has limitations because streams may lose much or all of their flow to groundwater. We developed a distributed hydrological model for Santa Rosa Island that incorporates geospatial and temporal data for climate (precipitation, solar radiation, wind speed, relative humidity, temperature), soils, vegetation, and topography to simulate the complex land-surface-groundwater behavior of island hydrology for hypothetical wet, dry, and median centuries. Our simulations show that water flow is greatest in drainages on the northwest and east coasts of the island. This correlates with some of the earliest and most persistent settlement on the island. During the most extreme droughts of the last 2000 years during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (1150-600 cal BP), island populations contracted to a small number of large coastal villages. We argue that this was related in part to the greater availability of surface water at these locations. This study expands the theoretical and methodological scope of past studies that have applied hydrological simulation to archaeological investigations. C 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

On California’s Northern Channel Islands, Paleocoastal peoples
produced extraordinarily delicate stemmed, barbed, and serrated projectile points between about 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. We analyzed several Paleocoastal lithic assemblages to explore whether intentional heat treatment was used to facilitate the production of these artifacts. We experimentally heattreated samples of three types of island chert (Tuqan, Cico, and Wima) to document the changes in the physical signatures of lithic heat treatment, then analyzed 1,453 lithic artifacts from Paleocoastal assemblages on San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands. We found that about 29 percent of the artifacts exhibited visible heat fractures and a large percentage of sampled artifacts had quantitative gloss scores characteristic of heat-treated control samples. Our results suggest that heat treatment was an important step used by Paleocoastal peoples
to produce finely crafted bifaces on the Northern Channel Islands.

Chert outcrops on eastern Santa Cruz Island were of vital importance to the inhabitants of the Santa Barbara Channel region because of their comparatively limited availability elsewhere on the California Channel Islands. Temporally diagnostic artifacts and radiocarbon dates from associated shell middens suggest that chert quarries were exploited throughout the Holocene. The importance of these quarries has been well documented in regard to microlith production as part of the shell bead industry during the Late Holocene. However, relatively little is known about local chert tool manufacture and exchange in earlier times. Systematic documentation of 26 known chert quarries, and sampling at associated shell middens on eastern Santa Cruz Island has resulted in the identification of significant spatial variability in chert exploitation through time. Whereas chert quarrying during the middle Holocene appears to have been opportunistic and dispersed throughout the landscape, comparable activities during the late Holocene became increasingly circumscribed as microlith production was intensified. These trends in chert procurement are interpreted in the context of temporal changes in subsistence, tool manufacture, and residential mobility on the northern Channel Islands, and have broad implications for spatial and temporal patterning in prehistoric lithic exploitation.

Islands are bodies of land surrounded by water; albeit well connected via the waves of ocean, movements of people and flows of technology. Smallness is both aesthetically pleasing and intensely practical. There are increasing challenges for small islands in our connected planet with the added risk for some of mounting global warming. This conference welcomes the presentation of research and reflection to address the nature of islands from the past to the future, to achieve a better understanding of the uniqueness, connections, cultures, ethics, technologies, innovation and sustainability for the many possible futures of islands and archipelagos. Sub-themes proposed are as follows:

The November 2011 Department of the Interior National Landmark designation of The Drakes Bay Historic and Archeological District, Point Reyes Station, California reads:  “The site is directly associated with the earliest documented cross-cultural encounter between California Indians and Europeans, leaving the most complete material record on the West Coast.  In addition, the site contains the earliest recorded shipwreck on the West Coast of the United States, the Spanish San Agustin.”  While the Drake in California theorists eagerly continue to claim Francis Drake’s landing site to be a little sand-filled cove along Drakes Bay, the Landmark designation wording was in fact purposefully written in duality as to what took place at Drakes Bay by mentioning nothing of a Drake landing.  Thereby, still leaving the question unresolved by professional historians as to which bay Drake might have landed. New research now concludes that Drake never set foot in what we call today - California. The new points of crucial evidence which have come to light in setting aside any California bay landing has the putative theorists scrambling to restructure their theories filled with even more conjecture...

Incorporating landscape archaeology and Chumash ethnohistory, we consider some lesser known facets of inter-village interaction in the northern California Bight. Utilizing the concepts of taskscapes, places, routes, and viewsheds, we evaluate archaeological data sets from Santa Cruz Island and the Oxnard Plain on the adjacent mainland. In particular, we discuss how travel routes and the distribution of resources, of both land and sea, were facilitated and/or controlled through site placement, intermarriage, and ceremonial integration. Although emphasis is placed on the Late Period (A.D. 1300-1782), it is also necessary to situate these interpretations within the broader context of middle (4500-1500 B.C.) and late Holocene settlement (1500 B.C.-present). In the end, we argue that the interior places, land-based travel routes, and terrestrial resources of these coastal regions, as well as the demand for products from the mainland interior, were important and changing parts of Chumash exchange and interaction.

Hunter-gatherer decisions about where to live were influenced by many behaviors, some easier to see in the archaeological record (i.e. hunting or trapping vertebrates, gathering shellfish, quarrying and flint knapping) and some more difficult (i.e. gathering and processing plants, environmental variability, spiritual meaning, social relationships). Spatial modeling provides a tool to examine some of those decisions based on how they influenced the location of sites. This study uses the tenets of central place foraging theory to build a multi-scalar settlement model for the Santa Barbara Channel of southern California, where rising sea levels during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene erased a large portion of the existing archaeological record and studies of macrobotanical remains are limited. The model is evaluated through comparison with the archaeological record, and reveals a complex set of priorities in decisions about landscape use. People appear to have evaluated different resource categories-freshwater, protein, carbohydrates, and lithic raw materials-at different spatial scales depending in part on their importance to subsistence but also on the variable productivity and distribution of the resources themselves. Spatial modeling has considerable potential for both analyzing the existing record and generating hypotheses for future research.

To date more intact dog remains have been found on San Nicolas than on any of the other seven California Channel Islands. However, little is known about them. During the 2007 summer field season we excavated a medium sized young male dog in a flexed burial position from a pit at CA-SNI-25, a large Native American village site. The dog exhibits hypodontia, noticeable tooth attrition, severe scapular trauma, and vertebral, rib, and phalanx pathologies. Most of the injuries appear to have resulted from a severe blunt force trauma of unknown origin and it is likely the dog would not have survived without human care. The results of our analysis contribute to the, somewhat limited, published data on archaeological dogs in California. In this paper we describe the biological characteristics of the dog especially his anomalies and pathologies and compare them with published reports of other North American archaeological dogs with similar conditions.

We establish a high-precision radiocarbon chronology for 2 house depressions at CA-SCRI-333, a large prehistoric village on the western end of Santa Cruz Island, California, USA. SCRI-333 is a large mound composed of a shell midden with more than 50 house depressions evident across its surface. We develop a chronology of occupation and activity for 2 of these depressions (6 and 32) based on a stratified sequence of accelerator mass spectrometry 14C dates. Carbonized twig and marine shell (Mytilus californianus) samples were selected from well-defined stratigraphic sections. Analytical error for these measurements is ±20 14C yr. We use a Bayesian statistical framework to propose an age model for the deposition of 2 features that may be associated with house construction. These data indicated that the features were not contemporaneous and suggest that house construction may have been sequential during the site’s occupation, a hypothesis that needs to be tested further. The methodologies used in this study have the potential to increase the chronological precision of household archaeology at SCRI-333, on the northern Channel Islands, and around the world.

California’s Northern Channel Islands have produced several Paleocoastal assemblages that include some of the most intricate and finely crafted lithic technologies in the Americas. Current understanding of chert use and availability
on the islands comes primarily from research on Late Holocene
sites from Santa Cruz Island, where chert sources played an important role in providing microdrills for Late Holocene Olivella bead production. New data from Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites suggest that Paleocoastal peoples relied heavily on other cherts from San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands. To examine the deeper history of lithic use on the islands, we analyzed eight Paleocoastal lithic assemblages from San Miguel and Santa Rosa, which were part of the larger island of Santarosae until about 10,000 years ago. We discuss lithic availability and material preference for formal and expedient stone tool manufacture on the Northern Channel
Islands between ~12,000 and 7,500 years ago.

"The purpose of this thesis is to explore southern California early Middle period gifting and reciprocal exchange networks and the underlying motivations responsible for the creation, maintenance, and possible rejection of social relationships. Geospatial patterns in the distribution of early Middle period stone beads, an important stylistic variant imbued with social meaning, coupled with the uneven distribution of stone beads and other symbolic artifacts in mortuary contexts suggest stone beads communicated important information about social identity. A fine-grained talc-schist chemical sourcing protocol is developed using Laser Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass-Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) that identifies soapstone source locations used in the production of stone beads (Sierra Pelona) and other artifacts (Catalina) while the source(s) of chlorite schist and chlorite talc schist used to craft the majority of early Middle period beads remains unknown. A theoretical model of mutual interdependence, adapted from systems theory approaches to the study of southern California hunter-gatherers and the more recent Interdependence Hypothesis is merged with the power and force model to explain underlying motivations for the creation and maintenance of obligatory gifting and reciprocal exchange relationships that reveals important information regarding social interaction among small-scale groups as well as factors that led to the emergence of large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies. The model is applied to the ethnographic Cahuilla representing a large scale mutual interdependence network regulated by the institution of ceremonialism and compared to the early Middle period mutual interdependence stone bead obligatory gifting and reciprocal exchange network, a possible remnant of the Early period Olivella Grooved Rectangular Bead (OGR) sphere of influence, that connected the Los Angeles area to the southern Channel
Islands, San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, lower Mojave River, and Coachella Valley. By the Late period the stone bead exchange network, which had previously operated parallel to the Santa Barbara Channel shell bead exchange network, was absorbed by it.
"

"Abstract—Prehistoric stone bead and ornament industries of southern California are poorly understood relative to the Santa Barbara Channel shell bead industry. Patterns visible in the spatial and temporal distribution of chlorite schist stone disc beads and ornaments suggest well-entrenched, potentially
competitive networks of interaction during the Middle to Late Holocene. Retracing the life histories of chlorite schist artifacts from archaeological deposition to lithic source origin may unveil intricacies of prehistoric politics, economics, and social dynamics not presently apparent in the archaeological record.
This paper examines the Santa Cruz Island Chlorite Schist source and its role in stone bead and ornament industries during the Middle to Late Holocene, and reports on the preliminary results of southern California chlorite schist and soapstone/steatite LA-ICP-TOFMS chemical composition analysis."