Changing Shorelines and Maritime Foraging during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene along California’s Northern Channel Islands: Assessing Settlement Patterns with Chirp Subbottom Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The California Northern Channel Islands contain one of the best preserved and most abundant records of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation in all of North America. These records have contributed to our understanding of early coastal migrations, the importance of Paleoindian maritime economies, and the initial human settlement of the Santa Barbara Channel region. Interpretations have often hinged on calculating the distance of early archaeological sites to paleoshorelines, which traditionally has been accomplished using sea-level curves and bathymetric models that do not account for sediment deposited offshore after inundation by rising seas. Here, we use high-resolution Chirp subbottom data to reevaluate distance to paleoshorelines at two terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene site clusters on the Northern Channel Islands and identify significant differences between the methods. Our results suggest that Chirp subbottom surveys offer more accurate reconstructions of ancient shorelines than bathymetric modeling and should be the new standard for reconstructing ancient settlement patterns of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene peoples along coastal and island environments around the world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35883.0