Prehistory of the Channel Islands

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. Jeanne Arnold and her colleagues will conduct three seasons of archaeological research at sites located on Santz Cruz Island, one of the Channel Islands located off the coast of California. Previous work has indicated an archaeological sequence which extends back millennia in time. The proximate goal of the research is to locate a number of submerged pitlike structures which served as living sites and to excavate a number of them. A remote geophysical survey will be conducted to find sites and on this basis a sample for excavation will be selected. Data will be recovered from ca. 30 houses at 6 well dated sites. In most, small scale excavations will be conducted while at three, larger areas will be exposed to develop an understanding of house floor features, differential distributions of artifacts, quantities of craft production by-products and the presence/absence of wealth items. The materials recovered will be analyzed to provide both environmental and socio-cultural information. Archaeological studies along the southern California coast in recent years have shown that the prehistoric populations of the Northern Channel Islands and adjacent mainland coast developed a highly specialized political economy characterized by unique features, the most important of which were legitimate craft specializations, an intensive exchange system across the Santa Barbara Channel, and an elite sector able to control resources, labor and the movements of manufactured goods through ownership of plank canoes and manipulations of valuables. Based on both archaeological and ethnographic data, anthropologists believe that the coastal Chumash peoples were among the New World's most complex hunter-gatherers. Dr. Arnold wishes to understand how this unusual level of complexity developed and was manifested in the social organization of the island populations. Because of the commercial nature of the craft manufacture, she wishes to gain insight into the relationship between economy and social organization. To accomplish this, she will focus on intra-settlement variation to determine the extent to which social ranking is evident and the degree to which it relates to manufacturing activities. This research is important because it will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will increase our understanding of United States prehistory and shed new light on how social complexity emerges.