Doctoral Dissertaion Improvement Grant: Environment and Culture Change in the Santa Barbara Channel, California, during the Early and Middle Holocene

Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. David Meltzer, Ms. Leslie Reeder will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will analyze archaeological data to determine how early hunting and gathering societies on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands in California adapted to rapidly changing environmental conditions at the end of the last Ice Age. During this period, rapidly rising sea levels and worldwide transformations in climate reorganized both the marine and terrestrial ecosystems on which many people depended. These ecological shifts were particularly strong along temperate coasts, where marine transgression and fluctuating sea surface temperatures substantially altered available resources in the near shore, estuarine, and terrestrial environments. This time period has been implicated in the early development of agriculture in the Old World and in the foundation of New World societies, and it saw people intensify their relationship with coastal ecosystems throughout much of the world. In spite of the interest focused on this time period, its coastlines have been difficult to study. Many have been inundated by sea level rise, and the time depth makes both archaeological and environmental data difficult to obtain. On California's Northern Channel Islands, rich paleoecological, geological, climatic, and archaeological records provide a remarkable opportunity to study the effects of these environmental changes on ancient people, while the geographic positioning of the islands has partially protected them from the heavy impacts of sea level rise. Drawing on the tenets of patch choice and central place foraging models, Ms. Reeder hypothesizes that fluctuations in the productivity and distribution of resources caused changes in how people used their landscape throughout time and space. The terrestrial environment was broadly characterized by a steady decline in productivity and an apparently steady increase in population, while the marine environment was more variable. It is proposed that people adjusted their settlement patterns to take advantage of new, productive environments or to compensate for reductions in productivity. The high quality of existing archaeological, geological, and ecological data available, along with the ability to store and process large amounts of information using geographic information technology, provide an opportunity to examine human-environment relationships at a larger geographic scale. GIS-based modeling will be used as an analytical tool to investigate both spatial and temporal changes in settlement patterns. This spatial model will be built using the parameters of human behavioral ecology, and will utilize both univariate and multivariate statistics to test the effectiveness of the model and the sufficiency of the sample. The model will also be field-tested in the Carrington Point area on northern Santa Rosa Island. This study will also consolidate dispersed interdisciplinary data into a cohesive database of value to many researchers, and will explore and expand on the application of sophisticated GIS modeling applications to questions about human-environment relationships.