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

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.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Re-evaluating the Marginality of California's Islands: Implications for Archaeological Interpretation   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage