Doctoral Dissertation Research: Household Economies: The Role of Animals in a Historic Period Chiefdom in Coastal California

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

In this dissertation project, Anna Noah (UCLA) will analyze large zooarchaeological collections from Island Chumash households. The data were recovered by Professor Jeanne Arnold's 1995-1997 NSF-supported Santa Cruz Island household archaeological research. With the exception of two sites in the Northwest Coast and Plateau regions, respectively, no other project has produced such a large and undisturbed collection representing simultaneously-occupied complex hunter-gatherer households. The excavated deposits date to California's Spanish period between 1782 and about 1820 and exhibit substantial cultural continuity with underlying Late period deposits. The data derive from commoner houses at three specialized bead-manufacturing villages and from an elite house within a village known ethnohistorically to have been a major trading port and home to an elite lineage. The port site also contains a dense stratum of animal remains and artifacts that may represent refuse from a feast that followed abandonment of the elite structure. Noah will identify approximately 35,000 fish, mammal, and bird bones and animal procurement tools from nine Chumash households representing the four villages. The UCLA Zooarchaeology Laboratory will identify another 25,000 bones. Because the sample is divided among nine households and several strata, the large sample size is crucial for reliable statistical results. Four-fifths of the faunal assemblage is fish bones, representing up to 100 species, making identification very time-consuming. A work-study student will assist with shellfish analysis, comparing the elite household and hypothesized feast strata. The fact that these data are provenienced to individual houses allows questions to be addressed that normally can be broached only with cemetery data and then only incompletely. By comparing households, the research will examine how the political and economic systems in a simple chiefdom were integrated in terms of acquiring and distributing animal food products. It will determine the extent and status of subsistence-oriented occupational specialization, focusing on fishing and sea mammal hunting. How food distribution was carried out within Chumash society, including the possibility of elite provisioning, will be explored. The use of animal products such as meat, fat, and furs in defining status will be ascertained by seeking evidence for status-related differences in access to these items. The nature of feasting in this kind of simple chiefdom society, actively threatened by colonial domination, will be investigated by determining the types of foods employed, how they were acquired and prepared, and what other artifacts were deposited with the food remains. This project offers a singular opportunity to study subsistence specialization, differential access to status animals, and feasting in a simple chiefdom reliant on fishing, hunting, and gathering. Only in the Northwest, where households were constituted very differently, have similar topics been systematically addressed, providing important data for comparative analysis. The research will fill a gap in our understanding of the evolutionary processes by which occupational specialization develops and elites become progressively differentiated from commoners. The study results will be available to the Chumash community, providing significant new information to these direct descendants about the lives of their ancestors.