Toolstone Sources off the Pacific Coast of Alta California: Implications for Evaluating the Marginality of Islands through Space and Time

Summary

Except for major sources of chalcedonic chert on eastern Santa Cruz and soapstone on Santa Catalina, the islands off the Pacific Coast of Alta California were long thought to be impoverished in high-quality materials for making stone tools. As a result, cherts and other toolstones could have been a major source of trade between islanders and mainlanders. We summarize the distribution of known lithic resources on the islands, documenting numerous chert types on the Northern Channel Islands and quartzites, metavolcanics, rhyodacites, and sandstones on the Southern Channel Islands. For islands occupied since the Terminal Pleistocene, the abundance and distributions of such resources may also have changed significantly through time due to sea level rise and coastal erosion. This spatial and temporal variability has implications for understanding a variety of issues, including the antiquity of initial colonization and permanent settlement of California’s islands, the distribution of Paleocoastal lithic technologies, the development of exchange and alternative technologies, and the broader issue of the ‘marginality’ of island environments. Given the discovery of new lithic sources over the last twenty years, further geoarchaeological surveys are required to better understand the diversity, abundance, and distribution of toolstone resources on California’s islands.

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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