Material conveyance in the Southern California Bight: Obsidian on Alta California's Channel Islands

Gill, Kristina M.; Erlandson, Jon M.; Hughes, R.; Origer, Tom; Rogers, Alexander K.; Vellanoweth, René L.

doi:10.1080/15564894.2019.1570988

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Erlandson visited the site in the early 1990s and recovered ϳeight percussion flakes of obsidian debitage on the site surface, all of which were determined to be from the Coso West Sugarloaf obsidian source on mainland interior California (Rick et al 2001). Hydration analysis of these obsidian artifacts showed that all had relatively large hydration rims (ranging from 6.35 to 7.15 microns) consistent with a single occupation dating to the Middle Holocene (Gill et al 2019).…”

Section: Ca-smi-172mentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Red Abalone Shell Middens, Human Subsistence, and Environmental Change on California's Northern Channel Islands

Rick

Braje

Erlandson

2019

Journal of Ethnobiology

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Red abalone (Haliots rufescens) shell middens, a distinctive site type on the California Coast dating primarily to the Middle Holocene, provide important insight into human-environmental interactions and climatic and environmental change. Despite decades of research and debate about why red abalone middens formed and how they relate to past human behavior and environmental change, significant questions persist about the nature of these sites and how they relate to broader trends in human diet and land use. Here, we present the results of excavation at three red abalone middens on the northern Channel Islands. Two of these middens, CA-SRI-26 on Santa Rosa Island and CA-SMI-692 on San Miguel Island, are among the older reported red abalone middens, at roughly 8000–7300 cal BP, and help fill a significant temporal gap in our understanding of the initial period of intensive red abalone harvest. The third midden, CA-SMI-172, dates to ∼6300 cal BP and fills a spatial gap on eastern San Miguel Island. When placed in the context of other Channel Island red abalone middens, our analysis demonstrates that people at some of the earliest red abalone middens harvested more red abalone and larger sized individuals than later in time. These data suggest that people likely placed predation pressure on red abalones across the red abalone midden period (8500–3500 cal BP) and that human activities worked in tandem with other environmental changes to influence the disappearance of the red abalone midden phenomenon ∼3500 years ago.

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Section: Ca-smi-172mentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Red Abalone Shell Middens, Human Subsistence, and Environmental Change on California's Northern Channel Islands

Rick

Braje

Erlandson

2019

Journal of Ethnobiology

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“…On Santarosae, there are numerous Channel Island barbed stone points and crescents along with red ochre, bone tools, and manufacturing debris at the CA-SRI-512W site, which is interpreted to be a temporary winter hunting camp that facilitated easy access to local birdlife and marine mammals that had become abundant on the island due to a lack of terrestrial predators. Midden remains are dominated by sea birds along with some marine mammal bones and smaller numbers of fish ; obsidian from the site has been sourced to a flow in eastern California, suggesting trade links with the interior, or residential mobility stretching over 300 km to the Coso Volcanic Field and beyond (Gill et al 2019). At two nearby lithic scatters (CA-SMI-678 and CA-SMI-679) dating to the same period, people produced numerous bifaces, stemmed points, and crescents from local chert outcrops and consumed abundant local marine shellfish and crabs .…”

Section: Coastal Highways To the New Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus

Gaffney

2020

J Archaeol Res

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Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.

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