Toolstone Acquisition in the Interior of California’s South-Central Coast: Raw Material Extraction in the Mid- to Late Holocene

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The use of local vs. nonlocal toolstone sources can reveal much about past hunter-gatherer behavior. Toolstone-acquisition-related decisions reflect past people’s settlement strategy—“mapping on” or logistically exploiting a stone resource, raw material quality, and environmental productivity. Our sample of nine sites is an optimal geographic context within which to investigate patterns related to toolstone acquisition in a toolstone-rich environment. In total, Dudek excavated over 200 m3 of soil and recovered over 380,000 artifacts from sites within a 4,400-acre area. The project sites demonstrated varied strategies toward accessing and using the primary quarry sources, as well as more secondary ones. When combined with the information collected from recently excavated sites at adjacent localities (specifically from the coast and interior of Vandenberg Air Force Base), these data shed light on the many ways that raw material acquisition shapes patterns of regional hunter-gatherer settlement, subsistence, trade, and exchange.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35745.0