It Takes a Village: Mainland and Channel Islands Population (Labor) Resources through Time

Author(s): Jeanne Arnold

Year: 2015

Summary

This presentation traces population estimates of the Chumash peoples on both sides of the Santa Barbara Channel through several thousand years, examining how researchers have arrived at those estimates and where possible suggesting how we might need to adjust both some of our assumptions and some of the outcomes. This review should be useful in further examining other phenomena such as sizes of labor forces available for the intensive Channel Islands specialized craft production industries (microliths, shell beads) or dietary requirements for subregions experiencing stressors such as drought. Comparatively robust community sizes on both the south coast mainland and the larger islands, particularly during the late Holocene, make clear that labor pools and leadership were well-established but may have responded differently to ecological instabilities. In no phase is a characterization of the islands as ‘marginal’ in human resources appropriate.

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Cite this Record

It Takes a Village: Mainland and Channel Islands Population (Labor) Resources through Time. Jeanne Arnold. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395124)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -125.464; min lat: 32.101 ; max long: -114.214; max lat: 42.033 ;