Prehistory of the Channel Islands

在国家科学基金会的支持下，珍妮·阿诺德博士和她的同事们将在位于加利福尼亚州海岸外的海峡群岛之一的圣克鲁斯岛上的地点进行为期三个季节的考古研究。之前的工作表明，考古序列可以追溯到几千年前。这项研究的近期目标是找到一些被淹没的坑状结构，作为活的地点，并挖掘其中的一些。将进行一项远程地球物理调查，以寻找地点，并在此基础上选择挖掘样本。数据将从6个年代较早的地点的约30所房屋中恢复。在大多数情况下，将进行小规模的挖掘，而在三次挖掘中，将暴露更大的区域，以了解房屋地板的特征、文物的不同分布、工艺品生产副产品的数量以及有无财富物品。将对回收的材料进行分析，以提供环境和社会文化信息。近年来，加利福尼亚州南部海岸的考古研究表明，北海峡群岛和邻近大陆海岸的史前居民发展了一种高度专业化的政治经济，其特点是独特的，其中最重要的是合法的手工艺专业化，圣巴巴拉海峡两岸的密集交流系统，以及能够通过拥有木板独木舟和操纵贵重物品来控制资源、劳动力和制成品流动的精英部门。根据考古和人种学数据，人类学家认为沿海的丘马什人是新大陆最复杂的狩猎-采集者之一。阿诺德博士希望了解这种非同寻常的复杂程度是如何发展起来的，并体现在岛上居民的社会组织中。由于手工艺制造的商业性质，她希望深入了解经济和社会组织之间的关系。为了实现这一目标，她将重点研究定居点内部的变化，以确定社会排名的明显程度及其与制造业活动的关联程度。这项研究很重要，因为它将提供许多考古学家感兴趣的数据。它将增加我们对美国史前的了解，并为社会复杂性的产生提供新的线索。

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.