The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region were among the most economically and politically complex hunter–gatherer cultures of the New World. In recent decades, rich ethnohistorical documents pertaining to Chumash culture were analyzed, thus providing an excellent foundation for understanding the simple chiefdom that was in place as explorers and missionaries arrived in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Current archaeological research on the Channel Islands focuses on the emergence of ranked society in Chumash prehistory, with special emphasis on political developments and environmental stresses that contributed to cultural evolution. A wide range of data acquired from the Channel Islands illuminates a new model of the rise of complexity. This model of chiefdom emergence is based on population-resource imbalances, political opportunism, and the manipulation of labor by rising elites. Diverse lines of evidence must be employed to evaluate the timing, causes, and consequences of increasing complexity.

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A NUMBER OF social, demographic, historical, and environmental factors affected the degree to which prehistoric coastal peoples became maritime oriented and hierarchcally organized. One type of historical-techno-log~cal development worth exploring in some detail is the importance of advances in water transportation technology for sociopolitical evolution. Evidence suggests that where largecapacity, reliable watercraft were developed that enhanced food-getting, ritual, trade, and communication systems, and where the opportunities to own or operate such watercraft were limited, advanced boat technology helped to stimulate new levels of sociopolitical complexity. Examination of two North American coastal hunter-gatherer societies and the ramifications of their advanced water transport technology reveals the multiple political and symbolic, as well as practical, impacts of boats. Rarely explored from this perspective, coastal settings represent distinctive environments with unique opportunities for i n t e n s m g subsistence, communication, networks of exchange, and hierarchy through advanced boat technology.Marx, Childe, White, and others have identified the means by which sophisticated technologies may stimulate social evolution, and debates concerning their insights have simmered for decades. Beyond this, the historical contextuahzation of the process of technological innovation is an important goal, and the several economic, political, and symbolic implications of this process must be considered. That is, study of the contribution of technology to the concentration of economic and political power

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The archaeological record from the last millennium in southern California indicates that a period of significant cultural change was associated with a reported marine paleoenvironmental disruption ca. 1150-1250 A.D. A lengthy warm-water anomaly may have in part precipitated more complex sociopolitical and economic responses. We develop independent verification of the perturbation (originally deduced from sediment core data) using archaeological data. Respiratory pore number allometry in the black abalone shell is known to vary clinally in modern populations in response to temperature-induced variation in rate of growth. We use developmental trajectories of abalone from dated, stratified archaeological deposits to reconstruct prehistoric seawater temperatures.

Abstract. An examination of the coastal geomorphology of bays along the Otago coastline, SE New Zealand, has identified a geomorphology consistent with tsunami inundation. A tsunami geomorphology consisting of a number of elements including dune pedestals, hummocky topography, parabolic dune systems, and post-tsunami features resulting from changes to the nearshore sediment budget is discussed. The most prominent features at Blueskin Bay are eroded pedestals although it is speculated that hummocky topography may be present in the bay. Tsunami geomorphology at Long Beach is more comprehensive with a marked association between pedestals and a hummocky topography. A full suite of potential geomorphological features however, is not present at either site. The type of features formed by a tsunami, and the ability to detect and interpret a tsunami geomorphology, hinges on the interaction between five key variables; sand availability, embayment type, nature of the coast, accumulation space, and landward environmental conditions. An appreciation of the geomorphic setting and history of a coast is therefore of fundamental importance when identifying what to look for and where to look for tsunami evidence. It is also important to realise that these features can also be formed by other processes.