Video
Insularity, the Seacoast and the PaleoCoastal Landscapes of California's Islands
Transcript
Rick: All right, well thank you for that introduction and hello to everybody out there on the worldwide web and virtual reality. It’s always a little fun to be talking into a phone wondering who’s on the other end. But hopefully we’ll have a good 45-minute discussion about, as Michael said, one of the most controversial and exciting topics, I think, in archelogy. And that’s the peopling of the Americas. You know, a central question in archeology is understanding when people first colonized an area. You know, when did they first arrive to a specific region of the world. This has particularly been an important question for the Americas, and for over a century, researchers have debated when, how and why people first came to the North American and South American continents. And of course, that question of when people first arrive to an area or more specifically, when they first arrived to the Americas, has a great public appeal. It’s a lot of interest to people in general. But it’s also got a lot of ramifications for how we think about the continent that we live on. You know, a continent without people, that’s never experienced people before, is one that’s very different after people arrive. So this question of when people first arrived to the Americas has all sorts of implications for what happened next, how did people shape the continent that we’re on, and ultimately it’s the story that leads us up to the present day. And how the Americas got to be what they are now, and where they’ll be headed in the future. What I want to talk to you about today is some of the work that we’ve been doing out on California’s Channel Islands in Channel Islands National Park over about the last 20 years that relates to the people of the Americas and specifically how it relates to the land and seascapes that people were inhabiting in North America or traveling through as they colonized this new continent. So we’re going to start off with a little bit of background on the peopling the Americas. And then we’ll jump in to our specific work out on the Channel Islands. And then I’m going to kind of then come full circle and talk specifically about the coastal landscapes and about landscape and seascape in general that people were occupying. And then ultimately I hope to [beep] present-day management on the Channel Islands. Before I dive in, I want to say in all confession, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in the whole peopling the Americas debate. I consider myself a coastal and island archeologist first, and someone who’s very interested in historical ecology and environmental issues. But the peopling the Americas has always been sort of ancillary to what I do. But it’s nonetheless a really important part, but a component of a much larger picture in thinking about human use and occupation of different coastal areas. You’re looking at, before I advance the slide, you’re looking at a picture of Santa Cruz Island, where there’s a series of sites basically everywhere around the coast you see. There’s a large shell midden. All right. So as I mentioned, the peopling the Americas is one of those topics that’s generated a lot of intrigue, a lot of interest from people and researchers for over a century, including some of the very first archeologists to work here at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. It’s generated a lot of public appeal and a lot of thinking about how people got to the continents. It’s something that happened relatively late, actually, in the human past. We’re looking at a colonization of the Americas when one [spot?] was around 11,500 radiocarbon years, or 13,200 calendar years, roughly. Now that, of course, has been pushed back a couple of millennias. We’ll talk about it in a second. But it’s generated a lot of issues. Of course, Kennewick man controversy and other things have really played into it. And then more recently, the genetic kind of revolution has helped us better understand who these people were and when they got here. Of course, what dominated most thinking about the peopling the Americas for quite a long time was the Clovis first hypothesis. The idea that Clovis peoples who used fluted points like the one you see there in the bottom right of the screen, that they came in through, across a land bridge during lower sea levels. Basically walked across the land bridge from the Old World and Asia into the Americas as climate was warming at the end of the Pleistocene. This created a corridor that was in between two ice sheets. And people basically followed that red arrow straight down into the mid-continent. And we get a series of Clovis sites that fan out from the American Southwest and inter-montane west, to the east coast and elsewhere. And the original thinking was that this was a fully terrestrial migration, Clovis first. And then people gradually spread from the interior to the coast, and basically then ended up living from sea to shining sea, all across the continent over the Holocene. And it really dominated our thinking for quite a long time. And I remember back when I was in grad school, my colleague Mel Aikens, or actually was one of my mentors, Mel Aikens, who’s a great mentor for me, one of my committee members, had written at that time, in 1990, this quote that you see on your screen right now, which is, “The idea that early people adapted to a maritime lifeway might have first entered the Americas along the northwest coast is imponderable.” And when I entered graduate school, back in the early ‘90s, that was sort of the thinking. People didn’t come down the coast. It was Clovis first, certainly through the late 1980s we thought about this. And I don’t want to be too flippant about this, because there were certainly people writing about a possible coastal migration. [Newt Vladmark?] had written about this almost a decade earlier. But those ideas really weren’t gaining a lot of traction. And then everything blew up with the discovery of the Monte Verde site, the report by Tom Delahey of the Monte Verde work and this multi-volume set he published. I think this is probably familiar to most of you now. It’s been a big deal in archeology for a long time, and continues to be. A team of interdisciplinary experts, including my former colleague, Dave Meltzer and others went down to evaluate the site and came back. And you know, the consensus was really that this showed, one, that there were people here before Clovis, and that they were all the way down, deep into South America by about 14,500 [Cal DP?]. And then an even more controversial claim of occupation maybe back close to 17,000 years. That one has taken a bigger hit and there’s not a lot of agreement on it. But still, this idea of 14,500 was a big deal and especially you see the 16,000 kilometers from Alaska, unique tool kit. Although it’s not on the coast, it’s sort of peri-coastal. There’ve been seaweeds and kelps found there, and other resources that show connections to the ocean. And this really raised a lot of questions. And in particular, the ice-free corridor was not thought to have been open by this time or viable as a pathway for people to walk into the Americas. This site and a series of developments later gave rise to kind of turning that Clovis-first terrestrial migration on its head and getting us thinking about a maritime migration and about a coastal route in particular coming out of Asia, following a similar landform. We’re not talking about people hopping in a canoe and jumping across the open ocean. We’re talking more about people using canoes to skirt the coast line. And again, they would be skirting that part of Beringia that’s the same area that would have been exposed by lower sea levels, skirting that area using boats and coming into coves and along that area, and then gradually going down the coast all the way to South America. This route probably would have been viable quite a bit earlier than the ice-free corridor or than a terrestrial route back 16, 17, perhaps 18,000 years ago, where you had pockets of areas that were ice-free that people could have skirted along the coast. One way to look at this, you can see there’s a different map here. This is something we just published in Science, Kind of showing that area in red there, where people could have traveled along and then some of the early sites that date to that period of time. Since Monte Verde there’ve been several sites that still receive scrutiny. I don’t want to say there isn’t debate about some of these, but have gained fairly decent acceptance among researches of being pre-Clovis. Paisley Caves in Oregon being one, Page-Ladson, there’s a series of other ones that we could talk about that have kind of fueled this idea that a coastal migration was very much possible. And of course having it be possible and having people actually do it, and then understanding how they did it, are two very different things, right? We know there’s lots of things that are possible people could do, but why they actually decide to do it or how they do it is a really kind of different thing. My former grad advisor and colleague that I work with, John Erlandson has hypothesized with some marine biologists what he’s called the kelp highway hypothesis. And he’s noted that along that same area that we were just looking at, where people could have traveled by boat, along that same area is the distribution of kelp. And you can see those kind of dark blue areas that skirt-- If I go back to this slide for just a second, you see the red areas there that people could have traveled. You come to the next map and you see those blue areas that are along the North Pacific and down in the New World. There’s a little bit of a break in the warm, tropical areas of Central America. And then you pick up again in blue in South America where there are kelp forests. That distribution of kelp mirrors the distribution we think, the routes and what’s important about this is that that means that people could have had a continuous string of resources that would have been very similar from northeast Asia all the way around the Pacific. Not necessarily the same exact species, but the same types of animals, the same types of environments. So the toolkit, the knowledge base that people would have had could have been similar and really helped fuel their movement into the New World. And this is the kelp highway hypothesis. Again, something that has received some critique. And there are definitely still issues to work out there. But nonetheless it’s an important way to contextualize the potential for a coastal route. Now one of the things that’s really plagued or challenged coastal research, and I’m going to get into this in more detail when we talk about the Channel Islands, is post-glacial sea level rise. And as we’ve come out of the Pleistocene, into the Holocene, so moving from an ice age when sea levels were considerably lower in the past. And then we have melting glaciers raising sea levels. We’ve lost an incredible amount of the coastal archeological record. And you can see there moving from left to right the increase in sea level and the change in meters. And of course with climate change and global warming, we’re living through an increase right now of sea level rise again. And we’ve tried to model and project how that might threaten archeological resources. So it’s a big issue that’s happened in the past, and certainly during the glacial period, and is happening again today. And it just challenges us [unclear]. We assume that these people were coastally adapted, that they lived along the coast line. That means that many of their most likely habitation sites then are submerged underwater. Now the coastal migration, Monte Verde, all of those things have kind of opened the door beyond Clovis first, opened the door beyond thinking about just the terrestrial migration. They also created a flood of theories that are less well supported. And I just wanted to mention there is an idea of people coming out. You see that arrow shooting up to the top of your screen and then over to the Americas. There is an idea that people would have colonized from the Atlantic. This is not very well-supported, very controversial. But nonetheless, people are putting some of these ideas. There’s even been one theory suggesting people may have come across the Pacific from Australia, too. So a lot of the floodgates were sort of open where we were once in this sort of Clovis first to now anything goes. And the science has really led us down the path of thinking that yes, the coastal migration along the Pacific coast is very viable. Certainly the ice-free corridor for a different or second or other migration is open. But these other models, coming across the Atlantic and elsewhere, are very problematic. All right. And then the last thing I want to mention before we move on is just the change and transformation that we’re living through right now. And that’s ancient DNA work of some of the earliest human remains that we have from the Americas, some of which is being done with tribal consultation, which is wonderful. They’re showing us some really new perspectives on the peopling of the Americas. There was just a paper by Ben Potter and his group looking at the DNA from some human remains from Alaska during the early Holocene. And those materials supported in their argument perhaps a terrestrial migration. The ice-free corridor, which I mentioned, wouldn’t have been open by the time Monte Verde. So that opening of the ice-free corridor is getting pushed back a little to maybe 13 or 14,000 years ago. Still leaving very little time to get down to Monte Verde. But all the time, we’re getting changes in our perspectives. And ancient DNA is certainly one of the ways that we’re starting to learn more about it. And my personal view is that the best way forward on the peopling of the Americas is the combination of archeological paleo-climate and of course, other research. I just want to mention, too, that this work about the coastal colonization of the Americas, about a coastal route for the first people to arrive on our continent, is not being done in a vacuum. It’s actually being supported by work being done in coastal areas elsewhere in the world. So just alongside the developments that we’ve had supporting the coastal migration here in the Americas, in Africa people have been pushing back the antiquity of the earliest human use of resources. This is a picture of Blombos Cave here, which is in southern Africa, where Chris Henshilwood and his group worked, finding 50,000 year-old human occupation of the cave that supports a lot of coastal research use, some of the earliest use of pigments and other things. So really interesting kind of modern human behavioral adaptations alongside coastal resources. And then Curtis [Marion?] at Arizona State has pushed it back even further, to about 120,000 years or so, with some of the very earliest modern humans we know of using coastal resources. And then we can extend this out beyond modern humans, and think about even coastal Neanderthal sites that have been known for a long time in the Straits of Gibraltar, where people were, Neanderthals in this case, were harvesting marine foods. And then, of course, the use of the marine resources, harvesting shellfish and your shore foods is very different than hopping in a boat and traversing the ocean to get another a whole continent. But we’ve seen some development out of Southeast Asia and Melanesia in particular in recent years, by Sue O’Connor’s group, showing that there were maritime peoples and others traveling out of Southeast Asia and into Papua New Guinea and Australia which were connected, certainly, with Ben Marwick’s group pushing back the colonization of Australia, which would have required a maritime route, a pretty large open ocean voyage to get to back greater than 50,000 years, or maybe even close to 60,000 years now. And then we’re seeing in the [Circum?] Papua New Guinea archipelago of islands, new maritime technology. This is Sue O’Connor’s work on Timor, where she’s got 42,000 year-old human occupation of caves with fish hooks and perhaps deep sea fishing evidence in some marine canyons and elsewhere. So pretty, what we would consider to be sophisticated maritime adaptations. That’s moving away from the shore and the littoral out to the deeper water with these distinct coastal technologies and techniques. And of course having early dates like this gives us sort of anecdotal support again for the fact that people could have colonized the Americas via coastal routes. So with that background and that context in mind, let’s shift gears a little bit now and kind of focus in on this top question of what were the land and seascapes like that these first Americans inhabited. And what I want to do is kind of walk you through the Channel Islands archeological record, specifically looking at a series of these early Holocene and terminal Pleistocene sites that we’ve located on the island. And then we’re going to dive deeply into what those land and seascapes were like that people were living in. And of course the title of the talk today is paleo-coastal landscapes. And the focus in on the paleo-coastal landscapes. And I’m sure that some of you don’t know what paleo-coastal is, or it’s not a term that you really think about all the time, which is completely understandable. So I thought I’d just mention, paleo-coastal is a term we use pretty fluidly, more or less meaning interchangeably to us, anyway, with Paleo-Indians. In this case, it would be those Paleo-Indian people living along the coast. It’s used pretty openly, though, to include any kind of coastal people of the Americas from the early Holocene up to about like eight thousand, 8,500 years ago, all the way back to our earliest sites, which were around 13,000 calendar years ago. So we’re talking really about the earliest Holocene and then the kind of terminal Pleistocene there. All right. So the Channel Islands are a really spectacular archipelago. I’ve got a map in a second. Really pretty spectacular. Does somebody have a question? No. Okay. Thought I heard someone. Pretty interesting area. They’re located right off the southern California coast in between Point Conception and San Diego. And I’ll show you a map in just a second. They’re right off the shore from this great, booming southern California metropolis. You see Los Angeles up there on the top. But you can be on a boat that’s literally an hour and a half ride away from Ventura, California, or even Los Angeles, out to Catalina, and you’re all of a sudden transformed or transported away from the densely populated, smog-ridden—I love Los Angeles, but it’s smog-ridden and pavement environment with all that hustle and bustle, to a world that looks like the bottom right there, where there’s very few people around. It’s very quiet. And you really get a sense or a feeling, anyway, that you’re being transported back in time to a landscape of what California was like before people had developed it, before it had really been transformed. So here’s a map of western North America, that box kind of showing the area we’re talking about down there where the Channel Islands are located. Zoom in. I know that’s not very effective. Here’s a map of the southern California [bite?]. And if you look at the mainland coast, where it’s labeled Los Angeles, you can see Ventura on there, Santa Barbara. And then to the west or the left on your screen of Santa Barbara, there’s a big point. That’s Point Conception. That’s an area where the west coast of North America all of a sudden stops going north/south and starts trending east/west. And that east/west area is what we call the transverse range, where you get the Santa Barbara Channel, which is that area between Santa Barbara [?] 19:31 and then the northern Channel Islands, which are four islands that go from San Miguel, on the left of your screen there, to Santa Rosa, to Santa Cruz and Anacapa, which is over by Ventura. Those four islands, along with tiny little Santa Barbara, basically sitting right in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of your screen. Those five islands together make up Channel Islands National Park. Santa Barbara Island, and then San Nicolas, Santa Catalina, the most famous, and San Clemente, down at the bottom, those are the southern islands. Two of those are owned and managed by the navy, San Clemente and San Nick. And then Santa Catalina is privately owned. Catalina is the only one with any kind of formal town on it. Then you can see all the pavement of Los Angeles as well. We focus most of our work up on the northern Channel Islands, and that’s primarily what I’m going to talk about. I had kind of [slides in?] 20:20 and I think the way we’re doing it, you can’t really see it, so unfortunately this slide kind of sucks. But I promise I will come back to at least one of these pictures. What you’re missing there underneath my big eraser of mistakes is up at the top is a picture of cattle. And the bottom is a picture of a woman from the 1800s pointing a gun at an elephant seal. And really this is just to tell you that the park service has done a pretty incredible job of trying to kind of undo the legacy of ranching and the fur and oil trades that pretty much devastated the Channel Islands, as well as other areas, greatly reducing marine mammal and bird populations, fishes as well. And then the cattle and ranching really transformed the islands and caused a lot of erosion. All grazing animals are gone. The islands are kind of restoring, or at least being released from the pressure of those introduced animals. And then after the Marine Mammal Protection Act and others, we’ve got great resilience and restructuring of marine mammals and other organisms, and the Channel Islands has just become this really wild and amazing place, where you’ve got 150,000 seals and sea lions that breed annually. Or more, that breed annually on the Channel Islands. You’ve got really unique endemic plant communities and an endemic species of animal that I’ll talk about a little bit later that are coming back. But one of the things we’ve asked as archeologists is well, what’s happening next? What are they being restored to? And we see archeology as a vehicle to help with that. This is just a picture of some of the sites we work on. This is a 1,000 year-old shell midden. My colleague, Todd Braje there, and then Chumash tribal member [Quinton Shupapa?] up standing on top of the midden. I love this one because that is the vertebrae from a blue whale just sticking out of the middle of the midden, so probably scavenged by people. But this is showing you again how well preserved these sites are because there’s no development, because there’s a real dearth of even burrowing rodent, we get exceptional preservation, with great time depth, that spans as you’ll see in a minute, from 13,000 years ago all the way up to the 1820s. And then after the 1820s, when Native Americans have been removed to mainland missions, there’s a really unique historical archeological record, too, that a number of other scholars have been working on trying to understand historical ranching and its legacy on the islands through an archeological lens. This is just a look quickly at some of the material culture of the Channel Islands. You’ve got [bone gorges?] 22:51 up at the top left. Those things that look like a little tin, those are used for fishing. They’re real simple fishing technology or toggle, where they basically bend in the fish’s mouth to be caught. And you’ve got circular hooks just below that made of shell, which were sort of the next kind of level up from [gorges?] 23:12. We get great preservation in cave sites, and even some open air sites, because it’s so arid out there in some places where we get cordage and perishables, like that part of a net down at the bottom preserving. Lots of projectile points, some for harpoons, some for arrow points, some for spear points. Those tiny little things on the green background are olivella shell beads, which were used as a form of currency for people to buy and exchange goods and services. And then of course a small model canoe there, dated to about a thousand years ago that’s a toy or maybe a heuristic device for teaching people about the ocean. Again, showing those connections that people had to the sea. So let’s zoom back in time. That’s sort of the 30-second crash course in Channel Islands material culture. But we can see here, the zoom in on the northern Channel Islands, the top is showing what they look like today. The area in gray is under ocean, but it’s just showing you some of the underwater, the symmetry there. And you can see the layout of the four islands, Anacapa being the smallest on the right, San Miguel off to the left, and the two larger islands in between. The island below that shows you various sea levels through time. And it shows you that at one point, all four of these islands were connected into one single land mass called Santa Rosae. And you can see, if you look at the far right of that bottom slide, there’s that area there that dives in on the mainland, where you’ve got the gray piercing through the two pillars of green, and there’s a little bit of blue there, too, that is a very deep submarine canyon. And what makes the island so unique is while they were conjoined into a massive super island, you can see there 75 percent of the island paleo shorelines were submerged as they broke into four islands. Although they were in the super island during lowered sea level in the glacial period, they were never connected to the mainland. There was always a water gap there of at least seven to eight kilometers. Which means unless these people were like superstar swimmers, they were making boats to travel out there. And it’s also led to unique biology on the islands, too, where there’s a lot of rare endemic things you don’t see on the mainland, and then a lot of things that are common on the mainland you don’t have on the islands. Like grazing animals, deer, large carnivores. Those kind of things just do not appear out there. It’s really, in some ways we would say a diminished amount of terrestrial resources. But in other ways, it’s kind of a rich cornucopia just of different types of things. So that’s sort of the, this slide’s important just to kind of keep in your head for thinking about the whole landscape concept. This is a place where these landscapes are one, very closely linked to the seascapes and the ocean environment. But they just transformed and changed. And people were responding to, living through and alongside all these really pretty rapid changes that are happening on century-level scales. And seeing a landscape go from a massive super island to one smaller island is a pretty big change. All right, so some of the sites. I want to just walk you through some of these earliest sites that have been found by me and/or some of my colleagues on the islands. This first one is one of the most famous sites out on the Channel Islands. It’s the Arlington Springs site. This was first discovered in 1959 by Phil Orr, an archeologist working for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. He found some human remains eroding deeply out of that cliff exposure that you see there, the red line pointing roughly to where they were found in the ‘50s. He had the forethought to realize that he had found something important. He actually did a little mini-summit after, I should say he radio carbon dated these to 10,000 years BC at the time. So that’s uncalibrated, so that would have been back roughly 12,000 or so years, depending on what corrections there were. Obviously this is still in the early days of radio carbon dating. But he had the forethought to know he’d found something really important. And he actually plaster jacketed, you can see on the bottom right there [Gillen Zuwetta?], a Chumash tribal member, and John Johnson, archeologist at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, working on the basic block of earth. He took it out like a paleontologist, the, I think it’s two femora and a patella that they took out of the deposit and he brought it back to the museum like that, which allowed for reinvestigation of the site 40 years later, when John Johnson took a team back and they did that stairstep excavation there that you see, really analyzed all the stratigraphy. Have done a whole bunch of re-dating, including layers around and within where the human remains were found, as well as the human remains itself. And they’ve shown that the Arlington Springs man, it seems to be the remains of a male, dates to 13,000 calendar years ago. And this, to my knowledge, and somebody can raise the chat question, still remains the oldest human skeleton in the Americas. I would love to hear if I’m wrong, to please tell me if I am. But if not the oldest, is one of the oldest. And certainly the oldest I know about on an island in the coastal area. A really important find. But again, it’s limited. There isn’t a lot of other material there. There was no technology associated with this. So it tells us, it’s like a postcard that says hey, I was here 13,000 years ago. But it doesn’t tell us a lot more than that. It also, remembering back to the sea level question, this site, while it’s near the coast today, would have been several kilometers away from the coast at the time it was occupied. Other sites that are really important, jumping back over, that was on Santa Rosa Island. The other sites that have been very important are Daisy Cave and Cave of the Chimneys, two caves that occupy opposite sides of the same point of San Miguel. These two caves have continuous occupation back about 12,000, maybe a little bit more than that, 12,000 years ago, all the way up to the historic period. Really unique perishables, like those knots down there, and then also shell beads in each of these deposits. And Daisy Cave has been another one of those sites that has been extremely important, because it’s got a well-dated, well-stratified, layer cake series of occupations, both charcoal and shell paired dates running throughout it support a human occupation back to about 11,500 years ago. And then more or less continuous from 10,000, eight, six hundred, all the way up to the historic period as I mentioned. So again, a little bit later. Maybe a millennium, 1500 years ago or so later than the Arlington Springs remains. But again this one is still very early, and it gives us that context. There’s a whole suite of fishes and marine mammals and birds that people were collecting and bringing back to the site that tells us about their maritime adaptations. It however didn’t seem to produce a lot of diagnostic technology. There’s certainly a big expedient [stone?] technology here and some shell beads. But it lacks some of the points and other things that we’ve found at other sites, although I show that one site there where it says “Or did it?” with the small point, that’s what we call Channel Island barbed point. This was found in the cave in the 1960s by Charles Rosaire, who thought it was late prehistoric in age, two thousand years or less. And we now know this technology and that point is probably indicative of an early Holocene occupation. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. What we’ve found since Daisy Cave and these other sites are a series of sites like these sites on San Miguel Island, a couple we call the Cardwell Bluff sites, which are located in a blowout here, but there are intact deposits so we’ve been able to radio carbon date between 12,200 and 11,400 years ago. We’ve got up in the left, we call Channel Island a [mole?] point. And then that thing covered in lichen next to it is a fragment of one of those barbed points. But these sites were really important and they produced a suite of materials that looked like this. What we call are [mole?] points, Channel Island barbed points, like that one from Daisy Cave I showed you on the right, and then eccentric or regular crescents, right there in the middle, these kind of lunate shape, chip stone objects that are common in the Great Basin and western portions of the mainland. This is the farthest west extent showing that these maritime peoples have this similar technology. And then we found a pretty remarkable set of sites exploring Santa Rosa again. This map shows an aerial photo of an area on Santa Rosa Island’s northwest coast that’s been extremely productive for finding early coastal sites. You can see the location of Arlington Springs down in the bottom left. And then two other sites we have circled here, SRI 26 and SRI 512 West. These two sites both produced evidence of human occupation back around 11,500 years ago or so. Really stratified sequence again of human occupation. These sites have no evidence of any later occupation at all, so really constrained to that early paleo-coastal time. You can see they’re sitting on the ocean today, right on these beautiful sea cliffs, they would have been somewhere between three and four, maybe even a few more kilometers away from the coast when they were occupied. So we’re just basically sitting on the tip of the iceberg, no pun intended, the tip of the iceberg, though, of where sites would have been. These were the camps away from probably what we assumed might have been primary habitation sites on the coast. This is close up here of SRI 512 West, and the [sequence?] eroding out of the sea cliff where you’ve got sort of the erosion causing these deposits to be melted off. When we first found this site, we found about 18 of these Channel Island barbed points in about an hour and a half. It was kind of an amazing day and we knew we needed to come back with some tribal representatives and do some small-scale testing at this site to really confirm that it had this old occupation. And right where Nick Jew, archeologist, is excavating in the middle, that’s where the intact deposits are that date to the paleo-coastal period. And then there’s just a series of soils above that that just don’t have any human occupation in them. And then from our excavations in situ again that produced similar suite of artifacts to this Cardwell Bluff sites. You can see the Channel Island barb points on the left, these crescents in the middle. We’ve also got some red ochre there. Smack dab in the middle of that photo and then some of the other [bi?] 33:28 faces. A little bit of [ bone?] and then on the right there are the bones of Chendytes Lawi, which is an extinct flightless duck that lived on the Channel Islands. A lot of waterfowl shows up in these sites. The first time we had at 512 West lots of this technology in association with [?] man. Because remember at Daisy Cave we had the [?] but we didn’t have very much technology. Here we have them together. And it’s a site that’s dominated by migratory waterfowl, like Canada geese, snow geese, even, and some of these extinct flightless geese. And these are some of those bones there. And what we think is this is some sort of hunting camp where people were taking advantage of birds. And it might be linked to the Pacific flyway, which went right over that area. Looking at the geomorphology and landscape reconstruction, there would have been a small embayment or freshwater lagoon, perhaps, that would have attracted birds. And then that picture there, the crescent on the left circle, that’s how we think they would have been used, is hafted sideways or transverse. And then the idea is they can be shot at or projected at a bird. And the idea might not necessarily be to even kill them, but to stun them or maim them so they couldn’t fly and could then be harvested by people. And then I want to, before I dive more deeply into the whole landscape question and issue to complete the talk, I wanted to just mention some work that my colleague Todd Braje, the Cal Academy of Sciences and John Erlandson and Amy Gusick at LA County Museum are doing. And they’re doing what we’ve needed to do for about ten years, but they finally got the resources to do. Which is underwater archeology, site scans, sonars. People going down in submersibles. They’re really, really projecting, and trying to look at those old paleo shorelines to see what is it. You know, we think we’re missing so much that’s underwater. Let’s actually try to solve that and see if we’re correct. Are there actually sites down there that would support what we think is probably a much more extensive occupation that we’re only hinting at the surface of. Or is it more complicated than that? This is just a reconstruction of their high-resolution sub-bottom sonar and side scan sonar. Sub bottom profile and side scan sonar were showing where they’ve been. They’re still early in this work, so I don't know that they have any sites yet, but they’re pretty optimistic about it, and excited about what they’re generating. So if we piece all of this together, where we sit right now is this kind of summary that we have, on the Channel Islands alone, which are just a pretty small part of western North America, we’ve got 21 sites that are greater than 9500 years ago. We’ve got four sites greater than 12,000 years ago. And then we’ve got a hundred sites roughly dating to the terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene together that don’t have radio carbon dates because they’re lithic sites. But they have diagnostic technology that supports that terminal Pleistocene [really old?] So roughly a hundred sites. That means a lot of people, a lot of occupation. Really important kind of paleo-coastal hub for people. If you’re paying attention, though, which I hope you are, this is where you start to say, well, wait a second, though, Monte Verde is 14,500 years old. And some of these other sites might even be older. You’re still a little young to be in the peopling the Americas game. And that’s absolutely correct. These sites are not those first Americans. Or at least they’re maybe descendants of some of those first Americans. They still help us get closer to this really important question of the first people who came. Certainly I think we’re looking at, if not the earliest Channel Islanders, some of those people who were very close in that game. But still, there’s that gap that I just wanted to point out as one of those questions that we’ve been working to solve. And maybe this underwater work will do that. Or if it doesn’t, that will raise other questions. And then I showed you that whole kelp highway model earlier. I just wanted to kind of conclude before I talk about landscapes again, just showing that these technologies seem to have some links to the Old World. And there are stemmed points that trace around the Pacific Rim. There’s a lot of debate about stem point origins, the western stem point tradition. A lot of questions still that need to be answered. But there’s some really interesting potential technologies. I don’t want to say that we’re saying these are the same tools. But the connections certainly are similar, and they need to be explored in greater detail. So let’s return, I’ll kind of wrap up here, let’s return to this whole idea about landscapes. And I sort of butchered the English language there with that land-seascapes. But I think in these terms, at least as they relate to the Channel Islands, as being very interchangeable. We’re looking at people who were equally at home on the land as they were out on the ocean. And certainly that interface between land and sea was crucial to their lifeway. And this map comes out of this underwater project, and then some of the work we’ve done on land, just modeling shorelines and other habitats, and thinking about just how different that landscape would have been. As I return to this slide, and this is the Pleistocene Santa Rosa as we call it, part of the mega island where people [were?] connected. All that area in green is underwater today, but would have been available for people occupying and using. And actually, if you look at the topography of this, which I don’t have a zoom in, there would have been a vast coastal plain out there. And most of the sites we’re finding are up on a terrace or hilltops today. That terrace would have overlooked this huge coastal plain. And we think one of the reasons we have these sites on the interior is the way people were using the landscape drew them to some of these interior terraces. Because there may have been freshwater there. We have areas where we know that streams would have collected pools of water during the dry season. We found tool stones, so chert outcrops in these areas that drew people to this area. And then of course there’s a massive amazing viewshed that would have been up there that allowed people during paleo-coastal times to see that whole landscape of that coastal plain, and then out onto the ocean as well. And then I just wanted to show you this, just to give you another perspective of how rapid the landscape changed on the right there, the top is Pleistocene Santa Rosa at its maximum. The green area around that shows kelp forest. And then you see if you just move down the bottom from the top right all the way down, you see the breakup that happened over about three thousand years or so, by about 9,000 years ago, the breakup into the four islands was complete. But again, people got there while they were still connected, and then lived through this entire breakup. So witnessing, adapting to, and perhaps influencing a really dramatic change in the landscape. And then of course the environment was changing a lot, too. We had massive climatic change, the people responding to increasing aridity, warming of the climate. And then moving from a more forested, conifer system, much more like present day Monterey or Santa Cruz, if you’ve ever been up there, like that during the Pleistocene. And then down into the more grassland, warmer habitat characteristics of southern California today. So really big landscape changes that people were probably making as much use of as they could, and certainly traveling back and forth between the coast and the interior, back around twelve thousand years or eleven thousand years ago or so. Now one of the things we’re really exploring, it’s not just how did people use and understand and learn about this landscape that they were living in, but how did they influence it, both positively and negatively. I know that’s kind of a value-ridden statement there. But how did people help shape the landscape? We know that people are not just passive actors in life. They’re actively manipulating and enhancing and also negatively affecting the places in which they live. So we know there’s a spike in charcoal that happened around nine thousand years ago, and another one around two thousand years ago or three thousand years ago, that seemed to be increases in possibly human-set fires. There’s nothing climatic, at least Scott Anderson, who’s done a lot of the pollen and charcoal reconstruction, there’s nothing climatic strongly pointed to an increase here in fire, but it looks like maybe possibly increases in human-set fires. We certainly know that historically the Chumash were burning portions of the mainland and the island to help clear the landscape. We also know that the fauna that were on the islands changed dramatically. We had pygmy mammoths that were living on the Channel Islands. We don’t know if people hunted them. We have no evidence, direct evidence, that people did hunt pygmy mammoth. Radio carbon dates do point at overlap, however, between the two, both humans and mammoths, at least coexisting for a century or two, maybe more. So that’s very interesting. Perhaps that’s one of the things they were looking at, sitting up on these terraces looking at that vast coastal plain, were mammoths. But they went extinct not long after people got there, around 13,000 years ago. We also have Chendytes swimming with the salmon there, in that painting on the right, that went extinct. Coexisting with humans for about five thousand years, and then were driven to extinction, perhaps by human hunting. But that’s a really long, protracted extinction. And then of course a mouse named peromyscus nesodytes went extinct during the Holocene. Perhaps being out-competed by another mouse, peromyscus nesodytes, which is an island endemic that we think might have been introduced by Native Americans eleven thousand years ago inadvertently on their boats, transporting mice out there. We have a record of translocation that perhaps starts in the early Holocene. Maybe 7500, 8000 years ago, right at that beginning of the middle Holocene, into the early Holocene, where we have island foxes perhaps transported out by Native Americans. Certainly moved between islands by Native Americans. And then dogs that were brought out by people perhaps nine thousand years ago. We want to redate something that was, a dog mandible, it was found on a site, but certainly by 7000, 5500 years ago, dogs were fairly widespread on the Channel Islands. Again, bringing out new animals, new fauna, has a pretty significant influence on the island. And that happens starting in the early Holocene, and presumably starting in some ways with the very first arrival of people on the island. It’s just a look, I mentioned there was diminished faunas. We’ll look at some of the other animals. Squirrels we think might have been introduced by people. Skunks, not likely. If there’s a skunk in a boat, you’d know it was there, though some people have argued they did. It’s pretty controversial. And foxes and mice, again, in the picture. And then we’ve also been looking at seal and sea lion populations, and noting that from the earliest sites we have had very different abundance of certain species than later ones. Lots of elephant seal early on. Very little, later in time. And they’re reorganizing, or reassembling, after being driven near extinction, the fur and oil trade. And what we’re seeing is they may be returning. We’ve just done some proteomic work to where they may be returning to what they looked like prior to humans arriving, to what their populations were like. There are some various similarities in the abundance of seals and sea lions and the types of species during the early Holocene, internal Pleistocene as there are today. And then the rest of the Holocene is quite a bit different. We’re still working on that kind of question. And then sort of the last two aspects of the landscape look at the terrestrial environment. And my colleague Kristina Gill has been looking at landscape management and enhancement. This is a field on Santa Cruz Island, or as far as the eye can see, a blue dicks, which are a bulb that you can eat. They produce that beautiful little purple flower there. And they’ve returned after grazing. And they were extensively harvested by the Chumash and might have been part of a managed landscape. Just controversial idea, lots of questions raised, but still an interesting one to try to pursue. And then we think island dune ecosystems, this is on San Miguel. All those red dots in the background there are these mega dunes that we get that are over 100 foot high. And they’re only there in part because people lived on them. And so there’d be a dune that’s maybe ten feet tall. People live on it eight thousand years ago. Anchor it down with a midden and soil, they leave. And another slug of sand comes in, you repeat that over and over again and you get these massive dunes interdigitated with a series of different human occupations. And you get a landscape that looks very natural in some ways, but is very much influenced by people. And then here’s a case that’s really positive enhancement, either unintentional, or you know, it’s hard to get the intentionality if people were trying to create mega dunes. But what we do know is that these dune ecosystems are harboring lots of endemic insects, and really high concentrations of native biodiversity. And so they’re pretty important out there, and they show a connection to humans. They’re also some of the environments most heavily threatened by climate-induced sea level rise today, as well as archeological sites. Let’s see if I can advance this again. We’re looking at here, just to kind of wrap up and connect, here are a series of pictures again. I’m sorry that I thought I was going to be able to kind of overlay these slides one at a time. But the Channel Islands, in some ways, and I put it in quotes, because we’ve still got a lot of work to do, a landscape that’s been managed by people for thousands of years. And that starts with the people who influenced it during paleo-coastal times, and then all the way up through the Chumash, who were on the island historically, and then late period times. All the way to ranching, and all the way to modern conservation. And to understand and look to the Channel Islands of the future, we have to interconnect and recognize the important intersections between the past and the present, and then ultimately how the past and present can help us look towards the future. And one of the things I just want to conclude with is just how important it is to link cultural and biological resources. And one of the things that we’re trying to get across is just how closely linked the biology and the people who lived on the Channel Islands were. And how you can’t separate out people from the natural environment as much as we might like to. It’s really not something we can do. it’s not realistic. And so we need to learn from and ultimately protect the past. Because our records are disappearing from sea level rise, climate change. They’re threatened by a variety of other processes. And now more than ever it’s important for us to stand up and be stewards of this crucial archeological record that can help us understand all the challenges that we’re facing in the future. And with that, thank you very much. Roller: Thanks, Torben, that was great. Folks, if there’s questions out there, feel free to join in either by phone or by chat. Rick: I’ve stumped everyone, they’re all asleep out in virtual reality, Or maybe there’s nobody there. Roller: The [unclear?] 48:45 says there’s about 40 people out there. Rick: Oh, okay. Roller: Forty shy people. Could you talk, actually I’m just curious, quickly, you focus on the northern Channel Islands. Is there a different ecological habitat in the lower Channel Islands? Is there a potential for similar sorts of finds? Or is there a difference because of their location on the coast? Rick: Yeah. That’s a great question. So we have done work on the southern islands, and there’s a number of other archeologists who’ve done work out there. surprisingly, the island that’s seen the least amount of work is Catalina, although there’s a group led by Wendy Teeter at UCLA doing work out there right now. And they’re getting some interesting results. But it’s sort of surprising in that it’s the most populated. I’ve done a little bit of work on Santa Barbara Island. The earliest sites we have there are four thousand years old. There’s probably older ones, but we haven’t found them yet. San Nicolas has an occupation we’ve carbon dated back to about 7500 years. And there was a crescent found out there, one of these chip stone crescents that would suggest that occupation went back to the early Holocene and perhaps even earlier. That island’s like sixty miles off the coast today. Even during lower sea levels, it would have been like pretty far out there, at least forty kilometers. So that’s pretty unique. And San Clemente Island has radio carbon dated occupations back like 9200 years old. So they’ve got similar sequences while there just aren’t the same number of early sites. I think more survey and analysis will help identify some of those. As far as the landscapes, they are quite a bit different there. They’re more isolated. They were never connected to each other or to the mainland. It really would have created sort of a different environment. You don’t have the sheltered Santa Barbara Channel there. They are quite a bit more arid. There’s less freshwater on all of them, and plant resources. But they do share a lot of overlap in similarity. Roller: Okay. I’ve got a couple of questions and one comment. James says there was another program recently about a female skeleton found in the bottom of a cenote in the Yucatan dated to about 13,000 years ago. Rick: That’s right, yeah. I do know about that one. Of course DNA was reported on that. But I think that, if I’m correct, it’s like roughly the same age as Arlington woman, so, or Arlington man. Arlington man was Arlington woman. It was thought to be a woman, by the way, for a while. And now it’s back to thinking it’s a male. But yeah, that’s a very good point. And that certainly, that might, maybe it beats it by a couple of centuries, I don't know. But regardless, it’s an Arlington Springs skeleton, human remains and then the cenote remains. And then of course the other Paleo-Indian human remains are a little bit older. They’re all really important. Roller: I have a question from [Anecia?]. Besides the vertebrae, what other whale remains are associated with this research? Rick: Hi, Anecia, great question. So the whale remains, that vertebrae, I should say, is not paleo-coastal that one’s only 1500 years old. We get a lot of whale remains in sites, particularly after about 3,000 years ago. But we find, you know, mostly ribs or rib fragments. We find occasionally cranial remains. You know, the large pieces of the rostrum and other parts. But a lot of times the crania are fragmented. We’ll get some of the ear bones that preserve really well. So we get whole skeletons in some cases. Not lots of them, but pieces. The vertebrae are really common, because they were used as a raw material that people would shape and then hollow out to use as bowls. And they would sometimes put asphaltum or tar on some of the holes to plug them up and make them somewhat watertight or to transport things. And then the ribs were really important. We have something called red abalone middens that date between 7500 to 3000 years ago. And those are pavements of red abalone shell that people would have had to dive to get. In those cases, they were using modified whale ribs to form like a little pry bar to help pry abalone off. So we find whale like that a lot. Roller: Great. Okay. Here’s another quick question. It’s from [Dara Shore?]. Great talk, Dr. Rick. You mentioned a few times that you work with Chumash tribal members during this research. Could you explain a bit more about how this relationship was established and what the scope of Chumash and other indigenous input in this project has been? Rick: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I mean, I think as an archeologist, I think one of the most important things we need to do working in native North America or really anywhere else is to work with different tribal and community members. It’s certainly something at the Smithsonian that we value. It improves and enhances our work. And it’s really, only way forward is through tribal consultations. Only ethical thing we can do. So we try to guide all of our work to include tribal representatives. And you know, a lot of times we’re working within park service protocol. So you know, that can be from the very basal level of having a Native American monitor with us, of course, on all of our excavations. Before we get any kind of permit, there is tribal consultation done, usually by the park service. But we try to interact as much as we can with the tribe. We host tribal communities from the Chumash and elsewhere here at the Smithsonian. And so I think it’s one of those areas that we think is incredibly important. We value it in our work. And we’re always looking for new ways to improve those relationships, and then certainly not to just have it in a sense of monitoring, but to have our tribal consultant there as a full participant in the project as much as they want to be, and to input traditional knowledge on anything that can help us, too. So I hope that answers the question. And if you have any input or insight on that, I’d welcome, because we’re always looking to enhance that component of our work Roller: Great, [unclear] responded great to hear, thank you so much. Next question, someone named D-r-c-h said, wonderful presentation, thank you so much. And then who owns these islands, and who gives permission to do archeological work on these islands? Rick: Great question. So the five, five of the Channel, they’re eight of them total, they’re broken into northern and southern groups. The northern Channel Islands, there’s four of them. And then the southern Channel Islands, there’s four of them. The four northern Channel Islands and one of the southern islands, tiny little Santa Barbara Island, it’s about one square mile in area, those five islands together are federally owned. They’re owned by Channel Islands National Park, or managed by Channel Islands National Park. San Miguel Island is technically owned by the US Navy, though the park service manages that island as part of Channel Islands National Park, in consultation with the navy. Santa Cruz Island, which is part of Channel Islands National Park, the Nature Conservancy does own a percentage of that island. I can’t remember if it’s like 60 percent, or what it is. I could look it up. I’m getting it wrong. But they own a large chunk of it. And the Nature Conservancy, who we work with, they manage that island in close consultation with the National Park Service. Now the other three islands in the southern chain, that’s San Nicolas, San Clemente and Santa Catalina, two of those islands, the San Nicolas and Clemente, are owned by the US Navy, so the federal government again. And then Catalina Island is privately owned, though there is the town of Avalon and a couple of other places there where private US citizens own property and live out there. And there’s a little Catalina Island Waterfront Revitalization with storefronts and beaches and things you can go to on that island. But the Catalina, again, is very unique, because it’s the only one that has that really public occupation of people living on it, not just visitation. Roller: Great. Let’s see. Here’s another question from James Williams. What do you think about the claim that all natives in the Americas are traceable to a [hearth?] group that stopped in the Alaska interior and traced to DNA from babies in graves. Have you heard about this theory? Rick: Well I mean, there is an idea that yeah, there was a single group and kind of sitting on the edge of that ice sheet up in Beringia in Alaska and then they might have [paved it in?] 57:01 you know, there might be something to that genetically. But I think the current consensus right now is that there were actually multiple routes and probably multiple migrations into the Americas. And I can’t say who those people were. But what I mean by multiple routes is it looks like there were probably people coming down in interior migration as well as along the coast. So I would just say, stay tuned. And anything that points to a single migration through genetic studies is interesting, important. But I think we need to evaluate it in the context of all the really pretty complicated archeological data that are out there. Roller: Great. Okay. Next question. Have you found problems with offshore dredging projects? Is there a lack of [unclear?] 57:48 complications. From Maria. Rick: That’s a good question. So I’m not involved in that underwater project. I’ve heard about it tangentially. And I have heard, I think what you’re getting at is people not consulting A, with tribes, or maybe even with the park service, and just sort of getting permission from Bureau of Ocean Energy or whoever it is that is managing that ocean floor there. So I have heard about some of it. I can’t speak to it. I’m not that informed on the topic. My own opinion, though, is that underwater resources should be managed just the way terrestrial resources are. There should be tribal consultation with that. There should be tribal members present during that work. It’s complicated, of course, because that work’s really expensive. You’re often looking for a needle in a haystack and maybe not finding that much. But we need to handle this thing aboveboard, just like you would terrestrial resources. So I can’t answer that question directly. But just to give you kind of that, I guess somewhat educated opinion. Roller: Excellent. Yeah. I think that’s true. And as we document and [form?] 58:51 more and more underwater resources, for example National Register or state inventory, more and more I think we’ll think about those underwater landscapes and seeing cultural landscapes as well. Rick: Yeah. And in Channel Islands National Park, there’s a lot of work that’s been done over the years on shipwrecks. And I know [beep] underwater group has been out doing work on that, too. And of course that is all done following on federal regulations and standards. Roller: And the next question from Scott. If the islands were never connected to the mainland, how did mammoths get there? Rick: Very good question. So I had that slide in there, which was an elephant swimming. And I kind of just blew past it. Elephants are really good swimmers. And we know that they can swim several kilometers in pursuit of food that they’ll smell with their trunks. And they use their trunks like a snorkel. And [unclear?] 59:45 algae, the mammoths could have potentially done the same thing and swum out to the Channel Islands. Probably during lower sea level, so they would have made that seven, eight kilometer crossing, not the 30 or 40 kilometer crossing in parts of the islands today. But would have basically sawm out there and colonized. And there’s some really interesting research that’s come out on mammoths in the last couple of years. And there may have been multiple colonization of the islands by multiple groups of mammoths. Each time there was a lower sea level, there was an opportunity for mammoths to get out there. And it would have been full-size Columbian mammoths that colonized the islands and then gradually evolved into Mammuthus Exilis, the island pygmy mammoth. And we have no indication that pygmy mammoths ever swam back to the mainland. But there does seem to have been probably multiple colonizations by full-size mammoths out there. So really interesting story that’s changing. And talk about landscape use, we think about humans. But having a grazing mammoth on an island would have a significant effect on those islands in the past. Roller: Great. Really interesting. Next question, from Michael Peterson. Is there any experimental studies on the aerodynamics and/or use of crescents mounted on arrow or [adalelo?] 1:01:00 shafts? Have any hafting elements been found that may have had crescents mounted? Rick: Yeah, really good questions. At least from the Channel Islands and the few I know of from elsewhere in California, I don't know of any hafting elements that have been found, like asphaltum or pine pitch or anything on them. I can’t say that I’ve done a detailed enough research in the Great Basin. There may be some out there like that. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. But I haven’t done an exhaustive look at that. if you shoot me an email, I can send you a couple of papers that talk about these topics. I know anecdotally of some people who have done experiments, but I don't know of any that have been published. And for a long time, it was just kind of anecdotal. Yeah, we think people are hunting birds in the Great Basin or in aquatic marshes with these things. But really until we found on the Channel Islands these crescents associated with aquatic birds, at least in the Channel Islands, we didn’t really have a leg to stand on of what they were being used for. But what you’re getting at is really important. One, it would be good to find hafting elements. And I just don’t think there’s been enough work on that. And then the experimental studies should be done systematically to help test this. That’s the next [ground?] 1:02:07 Because it’s easy to say they were [hafted transverse?] people were trying to maim a bird. It’s a whole other story to actually go out and do that and show that it can be done. Because it’s much more challenging than I made it sound. Roller: Great. Great. Okay. And the last question I have on the chat, from John Turk, can you talk more about linking cultural and natural resources? And in parentheses, the NPS has a directive to incorporate natural and cultural resources together. This is a really fascinating question. And I think a topic that came up a lot at the last SA conference. Rick: Yeah. Well, hi John Turk. Good to hear from you. I know you very well. I hope you’re doing well. We have, I wouldn’t say we’ve answered that question, because I think it’s a perennial challenge for anyone. Not just for the park service, but for anyone working on cultural resources, and any biologist working, is to try to get our two disciplines to work together and see the value of managing both natural and cultural resources. About, I guess it was about eight years ago, we wrote an article called “Conflicts between Cultural and Natural Resources.” And it was a little case study that we did on how seals and sea lions were hauling out and destroying archeological sites. Yet we couldn’t do anything about it, because they’re protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And how their recovery was just annihilating these archeological sites that are nonrenewable. And it was an interesting, we weren't nasty about it, we were just pointing out that here you have the protection of the species, biological resource really dramatically affecting the archeological record. And from that, we spun off a series of conversations with Russell Galipeau, the park superintendent at Channel Islands, who’s just phenomenal, and very interested in these kinds of things. And we ended up hosting, starting back in 2012, a series of workshops where we brought together stakeholders on the Channel Islands from across the biological sciences, ecology, history, archeology, geology, and then of course a whole series of park service employees on both the cultural and biological side. And we just got in a room and spent three days together talking to each other and saying, “Now here’s what we found, here’s what I found, here’s all the links to that.” And then tried to come up with some action items. And then since then, largely at the lead of the Nature Conservancy, we’ve hosted a couple of other workshops that take these ideas head on. And I think we’re getting closer to, if nothing more, a greater appreciation amongst biologists for cultural resources and what the past can tell us about the present and hopefully the future. And then also a greater appreciation from us, the cultural side, about the biological resources and the need to protect those. I just hope that we can get even further. And perhaps some of you out there are doing it, and I don't know about it, I’m sure it’s going on because so many people are, I think are more educated than I am about this. But I’d love to just see management plans that integrate the two as effectively as possible. Hopefully that’s a reasonable answer. I drank the Kool-Aid, I guess I’ll say, long ago, that I think archeology is crucial for telling us about not only what happened in the past, but how we got to where we are today both biologically and culturally. And then that story, that odyssey of natural and cultural change intertwined has so much to tell us about where we want to head in the future. And in this case, so much to tell us about what do we want the Channel Islands of ten years to look like. Or 20 or 50 years, or whatever park or whatever place he might be working in. And the only way we know that is to think about well what did they look like in the past? What’s realistic? What would they look like under a changing climate regime? How do we then merge all these things together? Roller: Great. Is there any other questions out there? Karen Mudar: Professor Rick, great talk. This is Karen Mudar. I am actually Mike Roller’s office mate. Rick: Okay. Hi. Mudar: Hi. And I wanted to ask you, do you think that people were deliberately firing the islands that produced the charcoal spike? And if so, what was the reason? Because other than mammoths, I think there weren't any ruminants on the island. Rick: Right. So we do think, well, we know from, let me lead back up a tiny bit. So I’ll answer that by saying briefly yes, we do think they were burning the islands at times. But I’ll say we can’t quite prove that. You know, charcoal can happen from both natural fires and from people setting them. We do know from ethno-historical data, from John Harrington’s work and other early anthropologists, that the Chumash on the mainland were burning the landscape. And in particular, they were managing and burning oak grove and other, largely to reduce brush and the understory. Sometimes to make movement between villages even easier, to reduce some of that brush. And we think there was probably the same type of thing going on on the island. Now whether or not they were using burning then to enhance certain plants, to enhance the recovery of edible plants or medicinal plants, that’s a different question. I know Kristina Gill’s really interested in getting to that. But we’re not quite there. We do think there was some intentional burning going on for a variety of reasons. But now where we are is figuring out well why, what, what might that have meant? And then, of course, if they were, and we can figure out with good hypotheses and good testing that they were, then what does that mean for the islands of the future? Do you reinstate burning? I know in the Channel Islands there was talk about a shrike, you know, a bird that likes sort of prairie-like environment. Where they’ll sit on fence posts and have an open environment. And they were declining a lot. And part of that decline might have been from habitat. And the only way to restore some of that habitat would have been burning. But then if you burn, you’re going to affect a whole other group of species. So it just raises lots of questions. And I’m not at the point where I feel confident enough that people were burning to say yes, let’s go ahead and do this. But I am at the point where I think they probably were. That’s a weird, roundabout answer, but hopefully— Roller: Great. Great. Thank you. One comment from Maria. Thank you for a wonderful presentation. And no, we’re not sleeping out here. Rick: (laughs) Okay, good. It’s kind of weird. You’re probably watching me. I can barely see myself because I’m lounging back in my chair. I watched like 100 people go by on a Segway a second ago outside my window. So it’s always an interesting feeling being on the phone for the webinar. But I’m glad no one’s sleeping. Or at least Maria wasn’t. Roller: Yeah. It’s a little surreal. It is. I had one more question, if no one else. I know you’ve done a little bit of research, or your colleagues have, of paleo coastal landscapes on the east coast. Can you talk a little bit about, of course we have a very different ecology, different geology. Can you talk a little bit about where that research is going? Potentials for similar sorts of finds on the east coast? Rick: Yeah. I’ve done work on the east coast but much later in time. Mostly the last like five thousand years. But certainly my colleague Dennis Stanford here and others have done work on paleo Indians on the east coast. And he’s the proponent behind the controversial theory I talked about earlier with the possible Solutrean colonization, which has really raised a lot of questions and a lot of controversy. But you know, as part of that work I think they and others have been doing really good work thinking about the Atlantic coast and then the early occupation of people here. There are a ton of paleo Indian Clovis points in the east coast, which were in these river valleys and other places along the coast. And there’s been a couple of purported finds underwater on the Atlantic seaboard, they’re also pretty controversial. There’s a site down at Florida that Mike Waters and his group found. It’s a freshwater sinkhole or, yeah. And those sites, again, point to the fact that people were here, and certainly using that coastal landscape. But what makes it so challenging on the east coast, I was complaining about sea level rise on the west coast. Well here, we’ve got these extremely gradual continental shelves that go out for a long distance and have, they’re very broad coastal plains. And what that means is in some cases, you’ve got like, the coastline would have been like 120 kilometers away from where it is today. And where we might have six or seven kilometers of shoreline movement in the Channel Islands, you can get over 100 here. And that just means that these sites that we hope exist on the Pacific coast are even that much harder to find on the Atlantic coast. But there’s certainly work being done on trying to identify those coastal areas, and I think it’s going to be really important. Roller: Great. Thank you. Thank you. Folks, are there any other questions out there? All right. It’s been a great presentation. Thank you so much, Dr. Rick, for your presentation and for answering questions. It’s been very informative on a number of levels. Great contribution to our discussion of landscape and archeology. Thank you to Archeology Southwest for collaborating with us on this project. And folks, thanks for your great questions, for participating. Rick: Thank you, Michael, and thank you everyone out there in cyberspace. Hopefully I’ll meet you in person at some point. And take care. Roller: All right. Take care, everyone. Have a great afternoon. Rick: Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you. 1:12:14 [End Webinar]
Description
Torbin Rick, 4/19/2018, ArcheoThursday
Duration
1 hour, 12 minutes, 14 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
04/19/2018
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