Seascapes and Society on the Forgotten Peninsula: The Watercraft of Baja California, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Baja California is a landscape formed by visually endless coastlines fringing a narrow spine of mountains and deep desert canyons with their hidden oases. The earliest European images presented of this original “California” depicted it as an island, separate from the adjacent continent. While this mythical geography was eventually revealed to be a literary creation, the ways in which this landscape shaped its human inhabitants were not without consequence. No human group has ever set foot on the Baja California Peninsula without knowing the sea. This is evidenced by the settlement of the peninsula by maritime groups since at least the Terminal Pleistocene. In fact, the use of watercraft to fish significant distances from shore even in geographic contexts that would not have required such craft to reach further suggests their role not only in early social and ecological systems but also in initial arrival. The social and human ecological systems created over thousands of years reveal insights into how a maritime way of life is distinct from more terrestrially bound systems in terms of transportation, community organization, interaction networks, and cosmology. In Baja California, the sea both binds and transcends time, space, and society for its human inhabitants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37017.0