Collaborative Research: Human Long Term Adaptation To Variable Marine Environments

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The goal of this project is to understand the timing and nature of human adaptations to ecological changes in California’s Channel Islands. This is a region where unique indigenous societies sustained long-term occupation despite profound environmental shifts that occurred. The strategies adapted include changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, increased material conveyance, technological innovation, and developments in ritual and sociopolitical organization. Archaeology is ideal for tracking these changes in culture and environment by being able to collect and evaluate deep-time data. How closely do cultural changes relate to environmental stress and how are people able to respond to, and in some cases foster growth, in contexts of environmental instability? These questions are relevant to modern society where rapidly changing ecosystems and environmental conditions create challenges in identifying sustainable practices and fostering resilience to support continued societal and cultural growth. This project will also provide opportunities for significant student training from a wide variety of colleges and universities across southern California and includes collaborations with members of descendant Native American communities.This research differs from previous work by including multiple islands, cultural groups and more than one environmental context. It asks the question of how major environmental and cultural shifts are reflected in their material culture. The research team will consider how diachronic shifts within cultural data sequences that span the millenia may correlate with data showing timing and extent of environmental fluctuations. These shifts will be considered within a region with multiple cultural groups to highlight particular adaptations tailored to each group or ecological region. This region has a very long history of human occupation, with significant environmental variation between the now eight landmasses of the archipelago. As such, adaptation strategies were likely tailored to individual ecological regions or specific cultural preferences. The research team will evaluate multiple lines of data from existing artifact and ecofact assemblages that are un- or under-analyzed, conducting tool production and maintenance analysis, lithic sourcing, macrobotanical and faunal analysis, oxygen isotope analysis, and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry analysis with Bayesian modelling. These data will elucidate the region’s changing cultural and ecological histories and allow for a comparative analysis of the adaptive responses of different human societies. By analyzing material from primarily existing assemblages using more advanced methods available since the times in which the materials were collected, the researchers avoid unnecessary excavation and help to enrich knowledge of museum collections.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.