A Bioarchaeological Test of Warfare Causation Models in the Santa Barbara Channel Area, California: A Question of Chronology

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Patricia Lambert will complete a multi-year, diachronic study of the causes of violence and war in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies of the Santa Barbara Channel Area of coastal southern California. This funding will permit Dr. Lambert to obtain sufficient temporal resolution of a widely employed chronology to permit testing of the hypothesis that climate-induced resource stress was an important cause of war in this region prehistorically. This research will also test the hypothesis that European contact changed patterns of warfare among the hunter-gatherers of this region, either fueling or suppressing its practice. Contact with Western nation-states has often been invoked as an important cause of war in many world regions, suggesting that these societies were peaceful before such contacts occurred. Human skeletal remains from the Santa Barbara Channel area the focal point of the research, and provide a relatively continuous, 7500-year record of human health and violent behavior. These remains document a history of violence that extends back thousands of years, but peaks during the latter part of this temporal sequence in what is known as the Late Middle period. This period constitutes an ~800 year time block dating between A.D. 400-1380. Health indicators show greatest health declines during this time period and provide evidence that injurious violent behavior and health stress coincided in this region prehistorically. Tree ring data on climate further indicate that severe and sustained droughts characterized two blocks of time within this period (A.D. 650-800 and A.D. 1100-1300). This apparent correlation suggests that environmental perturbations negatively impacted local food and water resources, and lend support to the resource stress model of warfare causation. Unfortunately, whereas the terrestrial climate data are calibrated to calendar years, the Santa Barbara Channel area chronology used to date most of the burials from the region is based on a seriation of burial-associated beads and ornaments only very loosely tied to calendar years. Therefore, it is difficult to link changing patterns of health and behavior with climatic perturbations and other events such as European contact. This project is designed to resolve these and other dating issues through a program of radiocarbon dating that will calibrate the chronology and thereby facilitate testing of the warfare causation models that drive this research. The study will calibrate a chronology at the heart of archaeological research in the Santa Barbara Channel area. The radiocarbon dates obtained for this project will be made available to researchers working in the region through the archives of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, the California Radiocarbon Database ( free online resource serving scholars and the general public), and the publication of a volume under contract to Kluwer Academic Publishers. In these ways, this project will contribute substantially to the infrastructure of scientific research in an archaeologically important region of the United States.