Social-Ecological Resilience on California’s Northern Channel Islands: The Trans-Holocene Record from Paleocoastal Mariners to Complex Hunter-Gatherers

Summary

For more than 12,000 years, the Chumash and their ancestors thrived in a maritime hunting and gathering existence on California’s Northern Channel Islands. Despite a dearth of terrestrial game, growing populations, and major changes in climate and geography, the resilience of these maritime hunter-gatherers across the Holocene is remarkable, with only limited evidence for long-term human impacts, extinctions, or abandonment until the arrival of Europeans. Trans-Holocene archaeological sequences from the islands, coupled with paleoecological records of sea level change, sea surface temperature fluctuations, and precipitation changes, suggest that the Chumash employed a variety of adaptive strategies, including mobility, resource switching, socio-political reorganizations, technological innovations, and long-distance trade networks to promote socio-ecological resilience in delicate island ecosystems. The Holocene history of their relatively sustainable occupation of the islands stands in contrast to the dramatic and rapid collapse of post-colonial land and seascapes in southern California.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Understanding the Nature and Timing of Human Responses to Environmental Change

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