Doctoral Dissertation

Changes in Prehistoric Land and Resource Use among Complex Hunter-Gatherers on Eastern Santa Cruz Island, California

The question of complexity, both socioeconomic and political, is one that has been commonly associated with agriculture. Nevertheless, as has been documented among certain coastal hunter-gatherer-fisher societies, complex organization and technology may arise along different cultural trajectories. One such society is the Chumash, the native inhabitants of the Santa Barbara Channel region including the northern Channel Islands. Given their sophisticated technologies, island-mainland exchange system, formalized political leadership, and ritual specialists, the Chumash appear to have been operating at the simple chiefdom level at the time of European contact. Therefore, important questions to ask are how and why the Chumash and similar societies become so complex, and how it relates to episodes of population-resource imbalance. In the context of dense populations on the islands, drought conditions in the late Middle and Transitional periods (1300-600 BP) appear to have transformed their diet and economy by shifting the emphasis from terrestrial plants and easy to procure marine resources to intensified fishing and trade. As conditions deteriorated, residents invested more intensively into exchange, through which they obtained supplemental food items by trading manufactured goods.

The increasing importance of such investments and associated organizational changes are presumed to manifest in how people used the landscape and its resources through time, with responses varying depending on locally available raw materials. In particular, Eastern Santa Cruz Island (East End) was the primary chert source exploited to manufacture the microdrills used to produce olivella shell beads. These beads were important to socioeconomic transactions throughout the Channel. In this dissertation, the regional distribution of different site types on the East End was assessed through survey, site recording, and subsurface testing to detect temporal trends in land and resource use, especially with respect to microblade production. In sum, it is argued that responses to population-resource imbalances shifted from local solutions to external relations, and from terrestrial and marine to intensively maritime (i.e., fishing and trading). As island inhabitants invested more heavily in the regional economy and ownership, they also participated in the mechanisms enabling wealth accumulation and social inequality, as well as the formalization of political status through time.

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dissertation summary (pdf).