Late Holocene Nearshore Marine Productivity, Climate Change, and Changing Sociopolitical Dynamics on California’s Northern Channel Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding the social, political, and economic dynamics of coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers was a hallmark of Jeanne Arnold’s multi-decade archaeological research. Arnold integrated marine climate records and archaeological data to develop hypotheses about the evolution of political hierarchy, exchange systems, and territoriality on California’s northern Channel Islands (NCI). This research was highly influential and spurred a series of lively debates that continue today. While marine climate records for the Santa Barbara Basin (SBB) are among the best in the world, with 25-50 year sequences for the Holocene, these records are averages for the SBB as a whole. This leaves key questions about local marine conditions near specific sites and villages, especially since marine climate and productivity (e.g., temperature and upwelling) are known to vary considerably across the NCI. Here we build on decades of NCI research by presenting compound specific and bulk stable isotope data from archaeological California mussel shells from across the Late Holocene NCI, including some of the sites excavated by Arnold. We also describe the curation of Santa Cruz Island archaeological collections at the Smithsonian Institution. These data illustrate the value of legacy collections for evaluating long-standing archaeological research questions and understanding climate change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38310.0