WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:03.720 --> 00:00:15.480 [instrumental music] 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:36.020 And that's going to lead me to the second part of my talk, which is about archaeology as historical ecology. 00:00:36.020 --> 00:00:43.300 In which I'll try to trace ecosystem change on the Northern islands through 12,000 years, 00:00:43.320 --> 00:00:46.220 right up to the present restoration era. 00:00:46.220 --> 00:00:54.040 And as I said before, historical ecology tries to unite paleontological, archaeological, historical and 00:00:54.040 --> 00:01:01.520 ecological scientific data into an understanding of how ecosystems have changed through time and 00:01:01.520 --> 00:01:03.600 how humans have affected them. 00:01:03.600 --> 00:01:10.100 And establishing baselines from the past of what ecosystems look like turns out to be really 00:01:10.200 --> 00:01:16.120 important, because its guiding conservation and restoration efforts on the islands and elsewhere by 00:01:16.120 --> 00:01:26.020 defining conditions that predate this era of European colonization and widespread ecological degradation, 00:01:26.080 --> 00:01:34.460 we can set baselines about what ecosystems looked like 400 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. 00:01:34.460 --> 00:01:41.860 An increasing number of biologists, restoration ecologists, the National Park Service, The Nature 00:01:41.860 --> 00:01:48.080 Conservancy are understanding and working with archaeologists actively now, to cooperate, 00:01:48.080 --> 00:01:55.220 to try to figure out how to take these ancient data, which seemed esoteric to many people 20 or 30 years ago, 00:01:55.320 --> 00:02:00.800 and use them in a practical sense to restore the ecosystems of the islands and 00:02:00.800 --> 00:02:04.080 other areas around the world. [slide change] It's really, really cool. 00:02:04.180 --> 00:02:10.300 So to start that historical ecology just remember that the Northern Channel Islands have changed dramatically. 00:02:10.300 --> 00:02:18.440 Over 20,000 years, or less, they've lost 70% of their land mass as Santarosae broke apart. 00:02:18.440 --> 00:02:25.360 And this, in really important ways, shaped the ecology and ecosystems of the Islands. 00:02:25.360 --> 00:02:27.360 [slide change] 00:02:27.360 --> 00:02:33.700 Uh, I wanna-I have a few slides here that just document how we do historical ecology. 00:02:33.700 --> 00:02:41.360 And part of it is as I said paleontology. Here's my wife, Christina Gill, standing next to what's called a caliche 00:02:41.360 --> 00:02:50.320 root cast on San Miguel Island. This is a tree of late Pleistocene age that the root, and root systems, 00:02:50.320 --> 00:02:55.580 and the base of the trunk have been preserved in calcium carbonate. This one's about that big 00:02:55.580 --> 00:03:00.960 around, maybe a little smaller, but some of them are that big around.They're Douglas firs. 00:03:00.960 --> 00:03:07.880 So there were Douglas firs and other coniferous forests that are much more typical of Northern California or 00:03:07.980 --> 00:03:13.720 Oregon today in the late Pleistocene. And those have largely disappeared from the islands. 00:03:13.720 --> 00:03:19.440 This is one way we can understand plant system changes through time. Another one is to study 00:03:19.440 --> 00:03:26.620 pollen remains, on the upper right. You can find them in sediments, sometimes lake sediments, ancient soils. 00:03:26.620 --> 00:03:32.260 And they are very distinctive as you can see. You can identify a variety of different species of plants and 00:03:32.260 --> 00:03:35.420 quantify them. Show the changes through time. 00:03:35.420 --> 00:03:44.200 And then, a piece of work that my wife Christina is doing, is really important, it's using charred plant remains from 00:03:44.220 --> 00:03:50.560 archaeological sites. Right now spanning about 10,000 years on the Northern Channel Islands. 00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:58.460 And her work is showing that these particular charred remains, these are the corms or underground root 00:03:58.480 --> 00:04:05.300 storage systems, like bulbs, of something called blue dicks, Dichelostemma capitatum. 00:04:05.300 --> 00:04:12.320 And she's finding them in virtually every site that we excavate on the islands, or sample on the islands 00:04:12.320 --> 00:04:17.740 spanning 10,000 years. And that is a really interesting story that I'll get into to. 00:04:17.800 --> 00:04:19.520 [slide changes] 00:04:19.520 --> 00:04:28.520 Another thing that we can do, is just, as I said, by taking a single shell from an eroding soil or an eroding sea cliff, 00:04:28.520 --> 00:04:36.860 send it off to a radio carbon lab-it now costs $179 per sample-and they'll send you back within a few weeks a 00:04:36.860 --> 00:04:44.980 date with a plus or minus of about 21 to 25 years. That's extraordinary advances in radio carbon dating. 00:04:44.980 --> 00:04:51.440 And we can go to a place like this, this is San Miguel Island. This is Torrey Rick and another one of 00:04:51.440 --> 00:04:56.720 my former students. To give you scale, this is a 100 foot dune, 120 feet maybe. 00:04:56.720 --> 00:05:03.120 And you can see soil here, soil there, soil, soil, soil. There's soils down here.[indicates white areas on slide] 00:05:03.220 --> 00:05:09.280 Soils down there. Soils here. Soils up there. And they all have shell middens, 00:05:09.280 --> 00:05:12.720 the debris of Island Chumash occupations. 00:05:12.720 --> 00:05:19.360 And you know, with just a couple thousand dollars, and a little bit of time, we can reconstruct a sequence here 00:05:19.540 --> 00:05:25.840 that shows us 7,250 years of Chumash history and also ecosystem history. 00:05:25.840 --> 00:05:28.920 Both the terrestrial ecosystem and the marine. 00:05:28.920 --> 00:05:34.180 And we've done in this a number of places on San Miguel, Santa Rosa and now Santa Cruz and 00:05:34.180 --> 00:05:40.260 they're allowing us to compile these really deep records, and really detailed records of 00:05:40.260 --> 00:05:43.200 cultural change and ecological change through time. 00:05:43.200 --> 00:05:50.120 The other thing that this has done, and we published a paper about ten years ago, is by doing this you can also 00:05:50.140 --> 00:05:56.620 measure the build up of dunes on San Miguel. And that's important because these surges 00:05:56.680 --> 00:06:00.340 in dune building have important ecological implications. 00:06:00.340 --> 00:06:06.720 They change the coastline from rocky shore to sandy beach. They change the hydrology of where you can 00:06:06.720 --> 00:06:13.800 get fresh water. They change the plant communities that live on them. And by charting dune building it 00:06:13.800 --> 00:06:18.520 tells us another story about the changes in the geography of the islands through time. 00:06:18.520 --> 00:06:19.540 [slide change] 00:06:19.540 --> 00:06:24.200 So now I take you briefly to the historic period and the historic Chumash. 00:06:24.200 --> 00:06:30.860 This is a, on the upper left, an old map of historic Chumash villages along the mainland, in the interior, 00:06:30.860 --> 00:06:38.940 on the Channel Islands. This is about AD 1760, estimates of population sizes just before Spanish contact. 00:06:38.940 --> 00:06:48.580 You can see there are about 20 historic villages known, maybe 22, 24 on the Northern Islands. 00:06:48.620 --> 00:06:56.260 And some of them are relatively large with up to 250 individuals. There are larger, purportedly, villages 00:06:56.260 --> 00:07:04.120 around the Goleta slough, Santa Barbara, mouth of the Ventura River. So it appears that populations were 00:07:04.120 --> 00:07:07.482 even higher along the mainland, but we're actually not sure about that. 00:07:07.482 --> 00:07:09.660 That's something we're taking another look at. 00:07:09.660 --> 00:07:16.380 My main point here is that this is a large Chumash village from the historic period. 00:07:16.380 --> 00:07:21.540 These are giant house pits. You stand in the bottom of them and the rim is up like this. 00:07:21.540 --> 00:07:29.200 And they are composed entirely of shellfish, and animal bones, and charcoal, and burned rocks, and 00:07:29.200 --> 00:07:32.500 artifacts left behind by Chumash people for millennia. 00:07:32.500 --> 00:07:41.360 In this case, I think this site is up to six or seven meters deep. What's that, 20 feet? Twenty five feet? 00:07:41.420 --> 00:07:49.840 These contain, literally, millions and millions and millions of shellfish, and fish bones, and marine mammal bones, 00:07:49.840 --> 00:07:56.480 and bird bones that can help us reconstruct really detailed records of not only the Chumash life ways and 00:07:56.500 --> 00:08:01.180 economy, but of the ecosystems that they were living in and harvesting from. 00:08:01.180 --> 00:08:02.260 [pause] 00:08:02.260 --> 00:08:08.800 And the Chumash, as you know, had a very diverse and sophisticated maritime technology, 00:08:08.800 --> 00:08:15.440 intensive regional trade with other islanders on the mainland, and it was based on a, on a monetary 00:08:15.440 --> 00:08:21.080 economy using shell beads that were produced almost exclusively on the Northern Channel Islands. 00:08:21.080 --> 00:08:23.080 [slide change] 00:08:23.080 --> 00:08:31.780 So we have these very long records. We can start at 12,000 years to historic Chumash times, but 00:08:31.780 --> 00:08:41.560 in order to compile complete sequences and connect the ecological studies of the 50's, 60's 70's, 80's and 00:08:41.560 --> 00:08:47.900 today with the historical data on fisheries, with the archaeological data, we had a problem on the 00:08:47.900 --> 00:08:55.520 Channel Islands. That problem was that the Chumash were removed by the Spanish fathers in the 1820's. 00:08:55.520 --> 00:09:01.760 And we had a gap of about 100 years where we didn't know anything, basically, about what the ecosystem 00:09:01.760 --> 00:09:08.640 looked like. There simply were no data. At least we didn't think there was any data until we started 00:09:08.640 --> 00:09:14.640 thinking about some things that we'd largely been ignoring for years. One of them was these [middens] 00:09:14.720 --> 00:09:20.680 There are scores of these on the Channel Islands. They are Chinese abalone processing sites. 00:09:20.680 --> 00:09:27.420 After the extermination of sea otters on the islands, and the removal of the Chumash, the black abalone 00:09:27.480 --> 00:09:33.040 populations in the intertidal zone were released from predation and just went crazy. 00:09:33.040 --> 00:09:39.360 Abalones piled on top of one another. Chinese came over, mostly to work in the gold fields. 00:09:39.360 --> 00:09:45.200 They have abalones in China, but they would have been over fished. And some of them came to the coast and 00:09:45.220 --> 00:09:51.520 saw these incredible fisheries and they started systematically harvesting an intertidal 00:09:51.520 --> 00:09:57.900 industry of black abalone processing; drying and then shipping to San Francisco and Chinese communities in 00:09:57.900 --> 00:10:03.940 the West, and also all the way to China. And we kind of knew about these sites, but, you know, 00:10:03.980 --> 00:10:05.740 we just weren't very interested in them. 00:10:05.740 --> 00:10:13.580 Until we started thinking about historical ecology, because these date between 1850 and about 1900. 00:10:13.580 --> 00:10:16.040 Right in that gap that we wanted to fill. 00:10:16.040 --> 00:10:22.360 So one of my students, Todd Bradjee, who has a book, actually just about to come out, on the Chinese abalone 00:10:22.360 --> 00:10:29.180 processing industry and its archaeology on the Channel Islands, started working on these and filling in 00:10:29.180 --> 00:10:35.340 one of the gaps. [slide change]. The other way, that was kind of unique, that we helped fill that gap, 00:10:35.340 --> 00:10:38.820 was a bald eagle nest on San Miguel Island. 00:10:38.820 --> 00:10:44.220 And many of you probably know the story about the collapse of the island fox populations, 00:10:44.220 --> 00:10:50.940 being preyed upon by golden eagles after the pigs and piglets had been removed from Santa Cruz Island. 00:10:50.940 --> 00:10:56.000 The golden eagles started preying on foxes and nearly drove them to extinction. 00:10:56.000 --> 00:11:01.560 One of the reasons they did that is because there were no longer any bald eagles on the islands. 00:11:01.560 --> 00:11:08.260 They had been eradicated by the 1940's and 50's by ranchers and ultimately by DDT. 00:11:08.260 --> 00:11:13.720 And that allowed the golden eagles to come out because bald eagles will normally keep golden 00:11:13.720 --> 00:11:15.720 eagles out of their range. 00:11:15.720 --> 00:11:24.460 So, this cascading series of ecological changes that started with the local extinction of bald eagles 00:11:24.460 --> 00:11:27.360 almost led to the destruction of the island fox. 00:11:27.360 --> 00:11:34.320 Well the park service, and The Nature Conservancy, and other agencies, once they'd figured out this story, 00:11:34.320 --> 00:11:37.040 wanted to reintroduce bald eagles to the islands. 00:11:37.040 --> 00:11:42.900 But before they did that, they wanted to make sure, if possible, that bald eagles wouldn't eat foxes as well, 00:11:42.900 --> 00:11:48.000 because they didn't know for sure. They knew they'd coexisted for a long time, but, 00:11:48.040 --> 00:11:52.280 they wanted to make, you know, let's cross all our "t's" and dot all our "i's." 00:11:52.280 --> 00:11:59.300 They sent Paul Collins, biologists at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Don Morris, retired 00:11:59.300 --> 00:12:06.660 archaeologists with Channel Islands National Park, and myself to western San Miguel Island about ten, er 00:12:06.660 --> 00:12:14.920 ten years, 15 years ago to excavate this amazing eagle nest. And there are photos of eagles nesting 00:12:14.920 --> 00:12:22.160 on this in 1937. I'll show you one a little bit later. We excavated this pile of sticks like an archaeological site, 00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:28.860 shifting all the remains, and the soil around it, and recovered 10,000 pieces of animal bone and 00:12:28.860 --> 00:12:35.940 animal shells. And we analyzed all 10,000 of those and only three or four of them were island fox. 00:12:35.940 --> 00:12:43.540 And those bones were from really, really old individuals that it looked like may have died and 00:12:43.540 --> 00:12:48.320 then been scavenged. Because bald eagles are heavy scavengers as well. 00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:53.960 So, basically the idea was, yes, it's safe to bring the bald eagles out. They won't kill the foxes. 00:12:53.960 --> 00:13:02.180 But in the process, those 10,000 bones and marine shells told us a tremendous amount about bird and 00:13:02.180 --> 00:13:08.380 shellfish and fish populations on San Miguel Island between 1850 and 1950. 00:13:08.420 --> 00:13:13.620 It was a cool project that ended up having some really interesting practical implications. [slide change] 00:13:13.800 --> 00:13:19.560 Okay, so now quickly through my historical ecology reconstruction of ecosystems through time. 00:13:19.600 --> 00:13:30.460 Back to Daisy Cave. There's a 10,000 year sequence there of both paleontological and archaeological, of 00:13:30.460 --> 00:13:35.180 Chumash harvesting. Around the corner is a site called Cave of the Chimneys. 00:13:35.180 --> 00:13:43.560 And that site was occupied multiple times over the last 8,500 years ago. And when Daisy Cave was abandoned, 00:13:43.560 --> 00:13:49.980 people seemed to have moved into Cave of the Chimneys. So we did small test pits in each of these, 00:13:49.980 --> 00:13:56.020 collected very large samples of animal and plant remains from both sites, and then 00:13:56.020 --> 00:14:03.380 compared them and together we have almost 10,000 years of, more or less, continuous occupation at one 00:14:03.380 --> 00:14:10.880 spot on San Miguel Island. Incredible preservation and an incredible record that's just almost unparalleled 00:14:10.880 --> 00:14:14.200 on the islands or on the West Coast of North America. 00:14:14.200 --> 00:14:21.560 Interestingly enough there's a lot of evidence for fishing in kelp forest and it appears to be very stable over time. 00:14:21.560 --> 00:14:27.940 We analyzed 50,000 fish bones and they're more or less the same species all the way through. 00:14:27.940 --> 00:14:29.140 [slide change] 00:14:29.140 --> 00:14:35.840 But using those records and some from nearby sites we can at least show some general trends in ancient 00:14:35.920 --> 00:14:45.440 Chumash harvesting and economy. And this is just a simple graph that plots the meat yield of shellfish, 00:14:45.440 --> 00:14:51.140 fish, and sea mammals-probably seals and sea lions, sea otters-through time. 00:14:51.140 --> 00:14:57.720 Ten thousand years ago to 7,500, in 2,500 year increments to the present. 00:14:57.720 --> 00:15:06.340 And you can see here, early on, shellfish are making up 80-85% of the protein or the meat we can measure and 00:15:06.340 --> 00:15:13.580 it declines through time. By this time [indicates last bar: 2,500-0] there's still lots and lots of shellfish, but 00:15:13.580 --> 00:15:20.680 they're getting smaller, as I'll show you. The other thing is that fish are going up astronomically. 00:15:20.680 --> 00:15:25.900 And there's a total reversal. Even though there's still lots of shellfish remains being taken out of the local marine 00:15:25.900 --> 00:15:32.340 system, there are a lot more fish. And so fish end up dominating the diet. And marine mammals 00:15:32.480 --> 00:15:40.400 sorta gradually grow through time. The same general increase. So these are adaptive adjustments, 00:15:40.400 --> 00:15:48.780 shifts probably to changing environments, changing technologies, and also changing population levels, and 00:15:48.780 --> 00:15:50.980 changing impacts to local ecosystems 00:15:50.980 --> 00:15:52.140 [slide change] 00:15:52.140 --> 00:15:56.540 Here's one of those, I mentioned that shellfish tend to get smaller through time, and we've shown this for 00:15:56.540 --> 00:16:02.920 California mussels, owl limpets and black turban snails, but its maybe most dramatic in 00:16:02.920 --> 00:16:08.440 the red abalone populations. There's something we call the red abalone midden phenomenon 00:16:08.440 --> 00:16:14.400 where there are very large and very dense middens that are mostly red abalone, and the red 00:16:14.400 --> 00:16:21.600 abalones are always huge. The heyday of that is around 3,500 to 8,000 years ago. 00:16:21.600 --> 00:16:26.800 And you can see that it's not a perfect picture. This is a statistical average,[pointing to angled, red line] 00:16:26.900 --> 00:16:35.340 but overall, we have very large abalones here at 7,500 years. Still big here. Some sites with smaller ones, but 00:16:35.340 --> 00:16:42.560 there's a general trend-and look at the last 3,500 years-there, down here, they're less than half the size 00:16:42.580 --> 00:16:48.300 they are up in here. And we think these, this is because of human predation, the effects of human predation. 00:16:48.300 --> 00:16:55.000 The other thing that was really interesting when we plotted this out and we started talking to biologists, 00:16:55.000 --> 00:17:01.980 those same kelp forest biologists that I met in 2000-2001 in Santa Barbara, and I showed [slide changes] 00:17:01.980 --> 00:17:07.280 them a picture of this. This is a San Nicholas Island red abalone midden and 00:17:07.280 --> 00:17:11.660 it's about 55,000 years old, I think. 00:17:11.660 --> 00:17:17.920 And there are hundreds, maybe thousands of red abalones, and, you know, there's-that's probably a black 00:17:17.920 --> 00:17:22.840 abalone. But look how big these are. These things are like dinner plates. 00:17:22.920 --> 00:17:32.580 And I was just breezily blowing through my overview of Channel Islands cultural ecology, like I am today, and 00:17:32.600 --> 00:17:37.500 I went right by this, I said this is a red abalone midden. They usually date between 7,500 and 00:17:37.500 --> 00:17:43.880 3,500 years ago. And I went on to the next slide and the kelp forest biologist were like, "STOP! STOP! 00:17:43.880 --> 00:17:51.000 Go back. What's that?" And I said that's a red abalone midden. And they literally couldn't believe it. 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:59.380 And the insight that they provided that no archaeologist had ever realized-'cause we're not ecologist-was, 00:17:59.400 --> 00:18:07.000 that they said, and it's backed up by modern fisheries data and ecological monitoring wherever sea 00:18:07.020 --> 00:18:14.540 otters are expanding into new areas, where there are red abalones, they said it was not possible for this 00:18:14.540 --> 00:18:22.200 kind of shell midden with these kind of red abalones to exist if sea otters were not-we're abundant or even 00:18:22.300 --> 00:18:28.280 present in the local ecosystem. And I said, but wait, we know they were present. We find sea otter bones 00:18:28.280 --> 00:18:35.880 all the time. But they said that, I-that's fine, but they must have been depleted, they must have been reduced, or 00:18:35.880 --> 00:18:43.660 hunted out of certain areas. And it made me think a lot about 8,000 years ago when these first show up. 00:18:43.660 --> 00:18:50.000 And in fact, we have one of these now at 12,000 years ago associated with all those little barb points. 00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:51.820 [pause] 00:18:51.820 --> 00:18:57.480 Something had happened as early as 8,000 or even 12,000 years ago where the local Chumash people, or 00:18:57.480 --> 00:19:03.260 their ancestors, were probably hunting sea otters and depleting them down to a point where 00:19:03.260 --> 00:19:06.400 the red abalone populations were exploding. 00:19:06.400 --> 00:19:13.260 And the, you know it actually makes a lot of sense because sea otter fur is the most luxuriant 00:19:13.260 --> 00:19:22.180 fur in the world. And you live on a cold, windy, foggy island and you can imagine that every single Chumash 00:19:22.220 --> 00:19:28.200 person would probably want to have a sea otter robe, sea otter blanket, sea otter cape, something like that. 00:19:28.200 --> 00:19:34.900 But as populations of humans grew, there weren't maybe enough sea otters and they depleted them. 00:19:34.900 --> 00:19:41.340 Never wiped them out, but depleted them, and then because they were active foragers with traditional 00:19:41.340 --> 00:19:47.380 ecological knowledge of the intertidal zone, they couldn't help but have understood that the red abalone 00:19:47.380 --> 00:19:50.780 populations and black abalone populations exploded. 00:19:50.780 --> 00:19:58.700 And it makes me think that, it'd be hard to prove, but that the Chumash after that point may in fact have 00:19:58.700 --> 00:20:04.980 depleted otters, not just for furs, but to keep the productivity in the intertidal zone high. 00:20:05.040 --> 00:20:10.080 An active kind of management to enhance the productivity of the local environment. 00:20:10.080 --> 00:20:11.480 [slide change] 00:20:11.480 --> 00:20:16.100 Well that raised another interesting question and it was related to the island foxes. 00:20:16.100 --> 00:20:22.720 And when we started this work, um, on historical ecology, it was widely believed that the island 00:20:22.720 --> 00:20:26.340 foxes had been there since the Pleistocene, on the Northern Channel Islands. 00:20:26.340 --> 00:20:31.700 There were museum specimens that were supposedly found in Pleistocene sediments. 00:20:31.700 --> 00:20:39.500 The biologist then believed that humans transported those natural foxes, island foxes, to the Southern 00:20:39.500 --> 00:20:47.480 Channel Islands about 5,000 years ago. Well, we got interested in this issue and decided to 00:20:47.500 --> 00:20:53.100 radio carbon date all those fossil fox bones. And what we found was a surprise. 00:20:53.100 --> 00:21:00.980 None of them were Pleistocene in age. The oldest one was 6,500 years old. We've now dated 20 or 30 00:21:00.980 --> 00:21:06.360 additional fox bones from archaeological sites. None of them are older than 7,000 years. 00:21:06.360 --> 00:21:11.680 And this now makes us believe that, actually, the Chumash brought the Island Fox to the 00:21:11.680 --> 00:21:16.600 Northern Channel Islands. It was not a Pleistocene endemic animal at all. 00:21:16.600 --> 00:21:23.680 A really interesting idea. It remains somewhat controversial, but, um, I think the evidence is growing 00:21:23.680 --> 00:21:28.120 rapidly and strongly towards a human introduction of the fox to the islands. 00:21:28.120 --> 00:21:34.820 What's really intriguing to me, is if they brought them about 7,000 years ago, as it seems, it's 00:21:34.840 --> 00:21:41.280 just about the time when the otters appeared to have been depleted. And so maybe they brought them out as 00:21:41.280 --> 00:21:47.460 pets, but maybe they also brought them out as fur bearers because they needed another source of 00:21:47.460 --> 00:21:51.960 nice warm blankets, pelts, capes, etc. [slide change] 00:21:51.960 --> 00:21:55.900 So then that leads us to another question. [slide change] What about the Island Skunk? 00:21:55.900 --> 00:22:02.440 How did it get there? Skunks aren't good swimmers. Ummm, whoops, sorry [slides changes back to skunk] 00:22:02.440 --> 00:22:09.820 There are not any Pleistocene bones that we know of, we have not dated any of the skunk bones yet, although 00:22:09.820 --> 00:22:12.760 I'll bet we'll get to that in the next few years. 00:22:12.840 --> 00:22:19.140 But I suspect that the Chumash probably brought skunks to the islands as well. And that raises a really interesting 00:22:19.140 --> 00:22:22.160 question about what kind of boat ride was that. [audience laughs] 00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:26.860 That could have been a really interesting boat ride. A long trip. 00:22:26.860 --> 00:22:28.860 [slide change] 00:22:28.860 --> 00:22:36.040 Well, so, part of what I'm showing you is some impact of Native Americans on shell fisheries. 00:22:36.160 --> 00:22:43.620 We can see it also in some fisheries, we think, measurable changes in fish bone size through time. 00:22:43.620 --> 00:22:49.800 But there are really very few or no extinctions. The island mammoths, the pygmy mammoths, went 00:22:49.900 --> 00:22:55.920 extinct about 13,000 years ago. About the same time that humans got there, but there's never been a kill site 00:22:55.920 --> 00:23:02.460 of an island mammoth, either Colombian mammoth or pygmy mammoth. We may find one at some point, but 00:23:02.460 --> 00:23:07.700 we know at that same time the islands were shrinking rapidly. Their habitat was shrinking, and 00:23:07.700 --> 00:23:14.380 they appear to have been eating conifers in part and those were disappearing about 13,000 years ago too. 00:23:14.380 --> 00:23:22.340 So I suspect the island mammoth was going down. And if humans did contribute to their extinction, it was 00:23:22.400 --> 00:23:25.580 probably no more than a coup de grace, and we can't even prove that. 00:23:25.580 --> 00:23:32.880 There is one extinction that we can prove. And with Terry Jones at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and 00:23:32.920 --> 00:23:38.140 a group of other archaeologist, myself included, we published a paper a few years ago about 00:23:38.140 --> 00:23:45.200 Chendytes lawi, this plumb little flightless duck that used to have ground breading and nesting colonies, 00:23:45.200 --> 00:23:49.520 large ones, on San Miguel Island that have been dated to 14,000 years ago. 00:23:49.600 --> 00:23:56.400 They're not there any more. They are extinct all along the California coasts. They have been found 00:23:56.400 --> 00:24:03.960 in numerous archaeological sites including that burn specimen from 11,750 years ago on Santa Rosa Island. 00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:09.900 They went extinct about 2,400 years ago on the California coast. No longer exists. 00:24:09.900 --> 00:24:17.220 The only well documented extinction that can be attributed to Native American hunting. 00:24:17.220 --> 00:24:24.280 Although, I think dogs and foxes may also have contributed to their disappearance on the islands and 00:24:24.280 --> 00:24:27.080 the mainlands. Not completely Native American hunting. 00:24:27.080 --> 00:24:34.520 The really interesting thing about this case is that human overlapped with Chendytes for at least 10,000 years. 00:24:34.600 --> 00:24:41.060 And yet it took 10,000 years, close to 10,000 years for them to go extinct. 00:24:41.060 --> 00:24:48.960 That's a very long, protracted process. It's very different than flightless birds that you see in other island 00:24:48.960 --> 00:24:55.480 groups around the world like New Zealand and Hawaii, or not Hawaii, but other Pacific islands, where 00:24:55.480 --> 00:25:00.320 human hunting tends to tip them over to extinction, sometimes within a few hundred years, 00:25:00.380 --> 00:25:06.720 a thousand years at most. So this is a very different kind of extinction that takes a very long time. 00:25:06.720 --> 00:25:08.280 [slide change] 00:25:08.300 --> 00:25:14.160 Um, one other interesting pattern that we've looked at. We've just kinda gone by animal group to animal group. 00:25:14.160 --> 00:25:20.360 This is pinnipeds. Seals and sea lions. There are six different species on the North Channel Islands, 00:25:20.360 --> 00:25:27.100 which is extraordinary, worldwide. The highest number of species in any one area that I think are recorded 00:25:27.140 --> 00:25:28.300 anywhere in the world. 00:25:28.300 --> 00:25:34.700 And they go anywhere from the huge elephant seals to the relatively diminutive harbor seal. 00:25:34.700 --> 00:25:41.620 Archaeologically we can trace patterns of pinniped hunting back 10,000 years. 00:25:41.620 --> 00:25:47.380 There are thousands and thousands and thousands of seal and sea lion bones in museums 00:25:47.380 --> 00:25:53.500 from the Channel islands and up and down the Pacific coast and the modern pattern on the islands is 00:25:53.500 --> 00:25:58.440 really dominated, even though they're six species present, they're dominated by northern elephant seals. 00:25:58.440 --> 00:26:03.420 There are thousands of them and they take up enormous amounts of space. But when you look at 00:26:03.420 --> 00:26:10.060 the archaeological data, there's almost never any hunting of elephant seals on the Channel Islands, and 00:26:10.060 --> 00:26:12.820 it's rare along the mainland coast as well. 00:26:12.840 --> 00:26:19.620 And that's really interesting because what is abundant archaeologically is the Guadalupe fur seal, 00:26:19.620 --> 00:26:23.060 which barely even exists on the Channel Islands today. 00:26:23.060 --> 00:26:29.060 They' re called the Guadalupe fur seal because the only place they bred was Guadalupe Island off Mexico. 00:26:29.060 --> 00:26:38.000 And only in the last few years when there are 150 or 160,000 seals and seal lions of the other five species 00:26:38.000 --> 00:26:44.220 have Guadalupe fur seals been shown to arrive, and pup, on San Miguel Island, 00:26:44.220 --> 00:26:49.560 only a handful of them have been documented, but archaeologically, they are by far the most abundant. 00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:58.260 So there is a disjunct here between the historic restoration situation and the ancient situation of 00:26:58.260 --> 00:27:00.260 the last 10,000 years. [slide change] 00:27:00.260 --> 00:27:09.260 So a big picture overview. We can now put together 12,000 years of sorta generalized picture of 00:27:09.260 --> 00:27:18.180 economic change, paelocoastal-mostly marine hunting, waterfowl and birds, some shellfish, some fishing, um 00:27:18.200 --> 00:27:22.020 but it looks like there is a lot of hunting based on the technology. 00:27:22.060 --> 00:27:28.980 By the early Holocene, starting about 10,000 years ago to 8,000 or 7,500 years ago, the emphasis is 00:27:29.040 --> 00:27:31.280 really heavy on shellfish collecting. 00:27:31.280 --> 00:27:37.180 Most of the meat comes from shellfish. And its supplemented by fish, marine mammals, and birds, 00:27:37.180 --> 00:27:42.060 and plant foods importantly, but shellfish seem to dominate. 00:27:42.060 --> 00:27:48.080 In the middle Holocene, there's this gradually intensification of fishing and pinniped hunting, and 00:27:48.080 --> 00:27:56.320 that really ramps up in the late Holocene, which is the last 3,500 years into the heyday of Chumash, 00:27:56.320 --> 00:28:00.820 Island Chumash occupation, 1,500 to 500 years ago 00:28:00.880 --> 00:28:11.020 with really intensive fishing in kelp beds and near shore, but also expanding into the big, pelagic fish like 00:28:11.020 --> 00:28:20.740 swordfish, pelagic sharks, big tunas. And this we think is a technological, technologically facilitated expansion. 00:28:20.740 --> 00:28:28.200 It's partly new types of fishhooks, circular shellfish hook here, starts about 3,000 to 3,500 years ago and 00:28:28.200 --> 00:28:36.380 fish bone is ten times more abundant after that period. But these big fish out in the pelagic zone, are probably 00:28:36.380 --> 00:28:42.600 being taken from tomols. The famous sewn plank redwood canoes of the Chumash. 00:28:42.600 --> 00:28:52.520 And they're so stable that they allowed people to go out and do, really, open water fishing and harpooning of 00:28:52.520 --> 00:28:55.260 these really big fish and then bring them back. 00:28:55.260 --> 00:28:59.900 So, this is kind of, as I said, a broad overview. [slide changes] 00:28:59.900 --> 00:29:06.580 So what we see there then is thousands of years, really, of sustainability and resilience. 00:29:06.680 --> 00:29:14.020 The same species, almost no extinction. Yes, there are size changes in shellfish. Yes, there are changes in the 00:29:14.020 --> 00:29:22.660 proportion of shellfish versus fish. But it's an incredible picture of 10,000 to 12,000 years of sustainable 00:29:22.760 --> 00:29:29.360 economy and, more or less, stable ecosystems, and resilience of the ecosystems, and 00:29:29.420 --> 00:29:37.240 all of that comes to a crashing halt in A.D. 1769 when the Spaniards arrive on the California Coast. 00:29:37.240 --> 00:29:43.400 And the missions are built one by one in Ventura, and Santa Barbara, and up and down the coast. 00:29:43.480 --> 00:29:51.140 This is often kind of a romanticized, you know, the mission period, the mission fathers, the Spanish 00:29:51.140 --> 00:29:56.500 uh, we've got Fiesta Days in Santa Barbara, Spanish architecture everywhere, but 00:29:56.500 --> 00:30:02.240 it's worth remembering that this was a period of tremendous suffering and really terrible 00:30:02.300 --> 00:30:09.440 time for the Chumash. Um, old world diseases that they'd never had any experience with, 00:30:09.460 --> 00:30:16.160 had no resistance to, decimated them. Probably 90% of the population died within 50 years to 00:30:16.320 --> 00:30:19.840 60-70 years in the mission period. From disease alone. 00:30:19.920 --> 00:30:28.580 And then, uh, you know, everything else that colonialism brought in, and the ranching and a total conversion of 00:30:28.620 --> 00:30:35.900 globalized economies, and trade, and over hunting and over fishing and over grazing that comes after that. 00:30:35.900 --> 00:30:43.100 [slide change] And that's-this globalization of world economies led to things like the Sea of Slaughter. 00:30:43.100 --> 00:30:49.120 There's a great book called Sea of Slaughter that talks about the 18th and 19th century whaling and sealing, 00:30:49.160 --> 00:30:58.380 um, mostly to produce oil that was burned in lamps in Europe and America and only really stopped once 00:30:58.380 --> 00:31:03.540 petroleum production started, people figured out how to make fuels from petroleum, 00:31:03.540 --> 00:31:07.260 but uh, worldwide decimation of marine populations. [slide change] 00:31:07.260 --> 00:31:16.380 The fur trade, this is in Alaska, but the piles of furs here; furs seals, sea otters and many other fur bearers 00:31:16.380 --> 00:31:22.440 were just hunted nearly to extinction or to extinction. Around the world. 00:31:22.440 --> 00:31:27.900 The ranching period is also romanticized here in California and on the islands. 00:31:27.900 --> 00:31:35.620 But the early ranching, with heavy livestock levels especially of sheep, and pigs, and cattle, and horses, 00:31:35.620 --> 00:31:39.480 the introduction on Santa Rosa of deer and elk, 00:31:39.500 --> 00:31:44.860 fundamentally altered the ecosystems of the Channel Islands. And it's only with their removal, 00:31:44.880 --> 00:31:49.960 relatively recently, that things are starting to restore and we're getting a better picture of what 00:31:49.960 --> 00:31:52.080 the real Channel Islands looked like. 00:31:52.080 --> 00:31:53.960 [slide change] 00:31:53.960 --> 00:32:01.700 At the same time in that historical ranching era, there were a lot of new species, exotic species, of plant. 00:32:01.700 --> 00:32:10.600 Olives, grape vines, eucalyptus, fennel-for cooking-Italian cooks on the Channel Islands brought fennel out, and 00:32:10.600 --> 00:32:16.840 it spread like wildfire and changed fundamentally some of the plant communities out there. 00:32:16.840 --> 00:32:22.080 This is one of the next big challenges for the park service and The Nature Conservancy is to 00:32:22.080 --> 00:32:26.700 figure out how to get rid of some of the invasive plants now that they've successfully 00:32:26.700 --> 00:32:30.700 removed the livestock and other exotic mammals. 00:32:30.700 --> 00:32:32.120 [Slide change] 00:32:32.120 --> 00:32:42.860 Yet, the devastation that was reeked in this colonial era and continues worldwide in many ways, 00:32:42.900 --> 00:32:48.500 on a planet that is so altered by humans that scientists are on the verge of recognizing a 00:32:48.500 --> 00:32:50.660 brand new geological epoch. 00:32:50.780 --> 00:32:55.860 There's the Pleistocene and then the Holocene and I would guess within a year or two 00:32:55.860 --> 00:33:02.120 they're going to officially designate the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, 00:33:02.120 --> 00:33:08.680 marked by human domination of global ecosystems and systems in period. 00:33:08.800 --> 00:33:18.640 Watersheds, water, fisheries, um, atmosphere, the presence of radio-radioactive isotopes and 00:33:18.640 --> 00:33:28.300 ice, ice in Greenland. It's an amazing story of the accumulation of human impact on 00:33:28.300 --> 00:33:30.420 earth ecosystems through time. 00:33:30.420 --> 00:33:35.580 And I believe it-we will be living in-well, I think we are living in the Anthropocene now. 00:33:35.580 --> 00:33:41.940 The big debate we're having is whether the Anthropocene starts in A.D. 1950, as 00:33:41.940 --> 00:33:47.980 it looks like it's going to, or whether it should really start 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago 00:33:47.980 --> 00:33:57.180 when agriculture was developed and other changes around the world started to accumulate. But in this 00:33:57.320 --> 00:34:02.500 geological epoch, the Anthropocene of human domination and alteration and 00:34:02.500 --> 00:34:05.380 intervention of natural ecosystems. 00:34:05.380 --> 00:34:11.360 One of the reasons I keep going back to the Channel Islands is that they, for me and many others, are 00:34:11.360 --> 00:34:17.000 literally landscapes of hope and inspiration. They are what California used to look like. 00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:23.420 And every year, they're starting to look more and more like what California used to look like. 00:34:23.420 --> 00:34:30.080 And The Nature Conservancy and the national park services removal of livestock and other exotic mammals 00:34:30.080 --> 00:34:35.820 is literally restoring the islands terrestrial ecology, changing our notions of biodiversity, 00:34:35.820 --> 00:34:43.200 the nature of edible plant foods on the islands, animal populations, and the very hydrology of the islands, 00:34:43.220 --> 00:34:49.540 the fresh water resources. When everything was mowed down by sheep, goats, cattle, [pause] 00:34:49.540 --> 00:34:55.620 the plants were so low to the ground that they didn't extract almost any water out of the fog 00:34:55.620 --> 00:35:01.480 Now the plants are growing up again and they're literally combing water out of the fog, 00:35:01.480 --> 00:35:07.880 what they call fog drip, and it doubles in many places the annual precipitation on the islands. 00:35:07.880 --> 00:35:14.400 It's changing the very nature of watersheds out there and the availability of fresh water, which 00:35:14.440 --> 00:35:20.440 we used to think was really restricted. Now we better understand why there were huge Chumash villages 00:35:20.540 --> 00:35:23.520 out in the middle of a spot where there's no fresh water. 00:35:23.520 --> 00:35:31.140 It's because the fresh water resources have been so altered in the last 150-200 years of ranching, and 00:35:31.140 --> 00:35:33.287 erosion and plant change. 00:35:33.287 --> 00:35:37.840 This, I told you about blue dicks, the Dichelostemma. 00:35:37.840 --> 00:35:42.920 This is on Santa Cruz Island last year, after three years of severe drought. 00:35:42.940 --> 00:35:52.160 And everyone of those purple flowers is a blue dick with a bulb full of carbohydrates, like a potato, about that big. 00:35:52.160 --> 00:35:57.140 And Christina, as I said, has been finding these in archaeological sites everywhere. 00:35:57.180 --> 00:36:06.180 This is an absolutely incredible resource, edible food resource, that the Chumash had for 10,000 years that 00:36:06.180 --> 00:36:12.220 we literally didn't know they had until recently, or we didn't know how abundant it is. 00:36:12.220 --> 00:36:15.540 It's virtually inexhaustible, I think. 00:36:15.540 --> 00:36:21.420 And so archaeologists used to think the Chumash had to import most of their plant foods from the mainland. 00:36:21.420 --> 00:36:23.420 I don't think they had to import anything. 00:36:23.420 --> 00:36:31.020 If they brought anything in the way of plant foods from the mainland, it was like a spice, or something different. 00:36:31.020 --> 00:36:37.160 You might get sick of blue dicks everyday after 361 days of eating them, although they're pretty tasty. 00:36:37.160 --> 00:36:43.820 But it's a phenomenal resource and its also one of those success stories where we can now see that 00:36:43.820 --> 00:36:48.480 native plant communities are coming back from 150 years of devastation. 00:36:48.660 --> 00:36:49.640 [slide change] 00:36:49.640 --> 00:36:54.460 There are other success stories just like it. The island fox is a great one. 00:36:54.460 --> 00:37:02.820 The park service with The Nature Conservancy and other partners has done a great job of managing and 00:37:02.840 --> 00:37:09.040 restoring and reviving a very threatened species of island fox. And I don't care whether the Chumash 00:37:09.040 --> 00:37:14.300 brought the fox there or not, it's been there for 7,000 years and its an important part of those 00:37:14.320 --> 00:37:16.140 island ecosystems today. 00:37:16.140 --> 00:37:22.340 When those foxes were put in cages for captive breading, I gotta tell you, doing archaeology 00:37:22.340 --> 00:37:25.020 on the Northern Channel Islands got pretty rough. 00:37:25.080 --> 00:37:31.120 Seagulls were everywhere and they harassed us relentlessly and it was just terrible. 00:37:31.120 --> 00:37:32.220 [audience chuckles] 00:37:32.220 --> 00:37:37.500 Anacapa Island and Santa Barbara Island are like that today. They are dominated by seabirds and 00:37:37.500 --> 00:37:38.989 we want to keep them that way. 00:37:38.989 --> 00:37:43.500 But on the Northern Channel Islands, when they let the foxes out of those cages, 00:37:43.520 --> 00:37:48.620 those birds are still there, but there not as abundant and it's a lot more pleasant working out there. 00:37:48.620 --> 00:37:49.780 [audience laughs] 00:37:49.780 --> 00:37:50.540 [side changes] 00:37:50.540 --> 00:37:56.420 Another great success story, I told you about that eagle nest that we dug. 00:37:56.420 --> 00:38:05.700 It was, I don't know, that's a pretty big bird and that's a huge nest. It's built entirely out of lemonade berry roots. 00:38:05.700 --> 00:38:12.700 And all those lemonade berries that used to live on western San Miguel Island, which is 00:38:12.760 --> 00:38:15.120 like a caliche, eroded landscape now, it 00:38:15.120 --> 00:38:20.260 apparently was full of lemonade berries earlier in the historic period. 00:38:20.260 --> 00:38:26.140 The cattle and sheep ate them, they died, the roots became available, eroded on the surface, 00:38:26.140 --> 00:38:32.680 the eagles picked them up, made the nest. I can't tell you-someone who's worked a lot in Alaska, 00:38:32.680 --> 00:38:39.080 seen a lot of eagles-how wonderful it is to go back to the Channel Islands and see eagles 00:38:39.080 --> 00:38:44.540 flying over the landscape naturally and nesting on the islands. Great success story. 00:38:44.540 --> 00:38:45.680 [slide change] 00:38:45.680 --> 00:38:52.220 The pinniped rookery on San Miguel Island, this massive Point Bennett pinniped rookery with sea lions here, 00:38:52.240 --> 00:39:00.360 sea lions there, all over here, all over there. Elephant seals, fur seals, you know, at any given day there 00:39:00.360 --> 00:39:09.340 might be 50 or 80,000 of these things barking 24 hours a day. It's an amazing place to camp and do work. 00:39:09.340 --> 00:39:13.960 Um, there are archaeological sites on these points. 00:39:14.020 --> 00:39:20.120 I've had a pinniped biologist take me down there, shoo them away gently, briefly, 00:39:20.120 --> 00:39:25.540 and they're destroying those sites, and so we're doing everything we can to at least date them, and 00:39:25.540 --> 00:39:29.520 sometimes take a small sample before the pinnipeds destroy them completely. 00:39:29.520 --> 00:39:38.640 It's, but this too, in 30-40 years is a tremendous success story. The weird thing about it, as I said is that this is 00:39:38.640 --> 00:39:47.120 a population of pinnipeds, six different species, that's reviving, restoring, coming back, but 00:39:47.120 --> 00:39:52.380 it's coming back in a structure that we don't recognize in historical or archaeological data. 00:39:52.380 --> 00:39:58.820 They're reassembling themselves in what might be natural conditions, but they might not be. 00:39:58.820 --> 00:40:05.400 And maybe they will eventually reach a natural condition that we can see in the archaeological record, but 00:40:05.400 --> 00:40:09.780 maybe we won't. I think what we need to celebrate for now is that there is 00:40:09.780 --> 00:40:13.260 a 100,000 seals and sea lions at Point Bennett. 00:40:13.460 --> 00:40:19.980 There is, by the way, a house pit, a big Chumash house pit village down in this area, in the middle of that rookery 00:40:19.980 --> 00:40:27.000 that was occupied 500 years ago. And I guarantee you, when those people lived there was no rookery or 00:40:27.100 --> 00:40:31.700 pinnipeds around that village. [audience laughs] So that again suggests that 00:40:31.720 --> 00:40:38.060 it may something of a historical anomaly, but something like it has existed for 10,000 years, 00:40:38.060 --> 00:40:44.000 probably just more likely that it was out on rocky islets offshore than on the mainland here. 00:40:44.000 --> 00:40:44.980 [slide change] 00:40:45.060 --> 00:40:52.480 And so, in concluding part two, archaeology and historical ecology tell us that the Channel Islands 00:40:52.480 --> 00:40:58.860 and the mainland, Ventura County, have changed dramatically over the last 15,000 years 00:40:58.860 --> 00:41:00.860 since humans have been here. 00:41:00.860 --> 00:41:08.580 The Island Chumash actively shaped island ecosystems for millennia. They had measurable impacts to 00:41:08.580 --> 00:41:16.980 some resources that we can see. And they also, I think, actively managed the habitat and enhanced the 00:41:16.980 --> 00:41:22.820 habitat via things like periodic burning that kept grasslands larger 00:41:22.820 --> 00:41:28.700 and kept blue dick fields, corm geophyte fields more extensive. 00:41:28.700 --> 00:41:34.380 The Chumash clearly thrived on the islands for many, many thousands of years, and 00:41:34.380 --> 00:41:40.140 they created an amazing, complex, sustainable culture and economy, and 00:41:40.220 --> 00:41:46.560 it was devastated by European colonization. The Island Chumash were removed, um 00:41:46.560 --> 00:41:52.840 many of them died to diseases, the traditional economy, the monetary economy, the trade networks 00:41:52.840 --> 00:41:58.600 all broke down and over 200 years of overhunting, overfishing, overgrazing 00:41:58.600 --> 00:42:04.940 fundamentally changed the nature of Channel Islands ecosystems. And actually, to such an extent that 00:42:04.940 --> 00:42:08.960 at one point we thought they were relatively marginal habitat for humans. 00:42:08.960 --> 00:42:17.640 And now, I believe they aren't; I think they were paradise for 12,000 years or more, and 00:42:17.680 --> 00:42:24.880 paleocoastal peoples went there immediately and stayed there forever because the resources were 00:42:24.880 --> 00:42:33.540 amazingly rich in ways that we can only now understand, because the restoration of the islands 00:42:33.660 --> 00:42:38.140 is providing these lessons of hope, inspiration, resilience 00:42:38.140 --> 00:42:43.700 as well as a new understanding of their original richness of these island ecosystems. 00:42:43.740 --> 00:42:45.760 [long pause] 00:42:45.760 --> 00:42:48.600 I might have one more. [slide change] Thank you! 00:42:48.600 --> 00:42:53.940 Along with thanking all of you, I want to point out that what I've talked about tonight is not just my research. 00:42:53.940 --> 00:43:01.660 This is 50 people or more working for 30 or more years. Lots of students that aren't listed here. 00:43:01.660 --> 00:43:08.180 There are Chumash people, and archaeologists, and biologists and geologists, park service people, 00:43:08.180 --> 00:43:14.260 Nature Conservancy people listed here. I'm quite sure I forgot many that I should have put on here, but 00:43:14.260 --> 00:43:21.980 there's only limited space. It's also been funded by a wide array of different agencies, and 00:43:21.980 --> 00:43:30.820 universities, and institutions, museums, and supported in a major way by the National Park Service 00:43:30.820 --> 00:43:38.160 and now The Nature Conservancy and I hope all of you will continue to support the park service, 00:43:38.160 --> 00:43:43.160 Channel Islands National Park, the marine sanctuary, The Nature Conservancy, and all these other 00:43:43.160 --> 00:43:49.720 good organizations and individuals that help us not just understand the past, but use it 00:43:49.720 --> 00:43:55.580 to more effectively create a sustainable and amazing ecosystem off our coast. 00:43:55.580 --> 00:43:56.460 [slide change] 00:43:56.460 --> 00:44:03.820 I leave here with that last frontier I mentioned before and a picture of me in a submarine last fall. 00:44:04.400 --> 00:44:11.460 This is not what I normally do, but The Nature Conservancy got a submarine for four days. 00:44:11.500 --> 00:44:18.320 Uh, somebody donated the use of the submarine and they insisted that if they were gonna pay a little 00:44:18.360 --> 00:44:24.960 bit of money for a support boat, that I had to be in the submarine. And it was to explore the sea bottom 00:44:25.040 --> 00:44:30.680 between Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz islands, that area that I mentioned called Crescent Bay. 00:44:30.680 --> 00:44:37.440 It was, initially I wasn't going to do it, and then I thought "Oh, when are you ever going to get a chance to do this." 00:44:37.440 --> 00:44:42.240 I had no idea that the submarine was only four and half feet long in the interior.[audience laughs] 00:44:42.240 --> 00:44:50.220 And I'm six feet tall. So my face was literally, I'm lying on my stomach like this with my face in a face plate, 00:44:50.220 --> 00:44:57.020 my legs buckled up behind me for two hours of every dive. It was unbelievably uncomfortable, 00:44:57.020 --> 00:45:02.700 we filmed the sea bottom the entire time and I've never done anything more exciting in my life. 00:45:02.700 --> 00:45:07.840 [more laughing] So anyway, that's all I have to say. There is a last frontier out there, 00:45:07.840 --> 00:45:12.960 uh, these submerged landscapes. We've just started this four year project to try and map them and 00:45:12.960 --> 00:45:19.480 understand them and see if we can actually find evidence for human occupation off the current shore 00:45:19.480 --> 00:45:23.760 which will add another exciting chapter, I think. So stayed tuned. 00:45:23.760 --> 00:45:34.220 [audience claps loudly and camera pans out to show Dr. Erlandson at podium] 00:45:36.240 --> 00:45:38.060 [clapping ends] 00:45:38.060 --> 00:45:45.700 (female moderator) So we'd love to open it up for questions now if anyone has questions for him 00:45:45.700 --> 00:45:52.020 and if you'd like to wait for the microphone [other inaudible directions] 00:45:52.020 --> 00:45:54.020 [long pause] 00:45:58.980 --> 00:46:03.440 (female audience member) I'm really interested in the crescents and how they used the crescents, um, 00:46:03.440 --> 00:46:09.520 did they have any kind of bows or did they just throw them at the birds or [er, um] did they have to get 00:46:09.580 --> 00:46:12.300 close enough to hammer at them? How did that work? 00:46:12.300 --> 00:46:19.600 (Erlandson) And I'm supposed to repeat the questions for the camera. And so, ah, the questions was 00:46:19.660 --> 00:46:25.740 you're very interested in the crescents and how were they use? And our best guess at this point is 00:46:25.740 --> 00:46:32.260 that they were tied to the end of darts that were then thrown with atlatls, the throwing stick 00:46:32.360 --> 00:46:38.780 that's sorta like, you know, leverages-it's like a tennis racket-it allows you to throw a dart a long ways. 00:46:38.900 --> 00:46:41.360 And, um, so that's what we think they did. 00:46:41.360 --> 00:46:46.700 We don't think they had the bow and arrow this early, although in Japan, they think 00:46:46.780 --> 00:46:52.960 the bow and arrow did exist this early, so we're not absolutely sure, but most likely they were put on darts 00:46:52.960 --> 00:46:58.280 and then launched at either individual birds or birds in flight. 00:46:58.360 --> 00:47:01.460 [pause] 00:47:01.460 --> 00:47:07.240 (male audience member) I have a question. In the expansion that happened [interruption] 00:47:07.320 --> 00:47:12.960 [now louder with microphone] In the expansion that happened in the 40 to 50,000 years ago from the 00:47:12.960 --> 00:47:22.120 Pacific, in your slide it showed them going back up to the north. No chance like for higher ground (?) or getting across to 00:47:22.120 --> 00:47:26.240 South America, back then? Or... 00:47:26.240 --> 00:47:31.800 (Erlandson) Yeah, was there any chance that rather than come around the North Pacific Rim that they 00:47:31.800 --> 00:47:35.960 went across the Pacific, 40 or 50,000 years ago? 00:47:37.820 --> 00:47:47.760 It is not impossible. It is possible and it will only take one significant discovery to show that it happened. 00:47:47.760 --> 00:47:53.640 All you have to do is find a 40,000 year old site on Easter Island or somewhere. 00:47:53.700 --> 00:47:56.500 (audience member) Wouldn't that be underwater though, back at that time? 00:47:56.500 --> 00:48:03.440 It would be, which is difficult, but, you know, the sites in Melanesia that I mentioned, um 00:48:03.440 --> 00:48:09.060 there are places there where the shoreline is extremely steep, it basically drops straight into 00:48:09.060 --> 00:48:13.420 a deep oceanic trench. And there are cave sites there, 00:48:13.420 --> 00:48:19.620 they didn't think anyone was on those islands before 35,000 years ago, but those shorelines have basically 00:48:19.620 --> 00:48:27.040 not moved in 40,000 years. If they moved, they moved a few hundred yards, which means that people in 00:48:27.040 --> 00:48:32.000 those caves were always close to the ocean because it drops straight into the sea. 00:48:32.000 --> 00:48:36.760 And they were surprised, these were Australian archaeologists that dig test pits in 00:48:36.760 --> 00:48:44.520 caves on those islands expecting to find 35,000 year old material, and they found 37,000 year old material, and 00:48:44.540 --> 00:48:48.580 40,000 year old material and that only happened about 20 years ago. 00:48:48.580 --> 00:48:53.740 And additional sites like that are still being found almost every year. 00:48:53.740 --> 00:49:00.820 So, it's not impossible that somewhere else out in the deep remote Pacific, 00:49:00.880 --> 00:49:03.420 a discovery like that could be found. 00:49:03.480 --> 00:49:09.340 The genetic evidence is increasingly compelling however and the people who moved into New Guinea and 00:49:09.340 --> 00:49:16.600 Australia have distinctive mitochondrial haplogroup types and those are not found in the new world. 00:49:16.600 --> 00:49:24.740 And so, it seems unlikely, but you know, even that genetic work is in its early stages so 00:49:24.740 --> 00:49:30.360 I don't doubt we're going to learn a lot of things in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years that will 00:49:30.360 --> 00:49:32.760 upset some of what I've been saying today. 00:49:32.760 --> 00:49:39.480 I did an interview recently for a magazine article in which I said something like, 00:49:39.520 --> 00:49:42.020 "everything I learned in graduate school was wrong." 00:49:42.020 --> 00:49:48.780 It's great. And it wasn't completely true, because I learned a lot of stuff in graduate school that was 00:49:48.780 --> 00:49:54.140 really helpful, but some of these basic theories, you know, have just done down the tank and 00:49:54.140 --> 00:50:01.760 reserved 180 degrees, and as more and more evidence accumulates, I know some of these things will change. 00:50:04.680 --> 00:50:11.340 Yeah? (audience member) I have a question. Do you know much about that, I think a few-a year ago I heard 00:50:11.340 --> 00:50:20.480 about a 14,000 year old skeleton found off the Yucatan, but I haven't heard anything about that lately. 00:50:20.480 --> 00:50:24.440 Is that, am I remembering that correctly or what do you know about that? 00:50:24.440 --> 00:50:30.580 (Erlandson) Yeah. The question is about an ancient skeleton found in a submerged cave off 00:50:30.620 --> 00:50:39.880 the Yucatan coast, and it's in a karst limestone landscape where there are these deep, you know, 00:50:39.880 --> 00:50:46.060 rivers, where rivers have run underground basically and created long, linear caverns, and there have been divers 00:50:46.060 --> 00:50:52.920 exploring those and they found a skeleton roughly eight or ten years ago, I think. As I recall. 00:50:52.920 --> 00:51:00.380 And brought it up and carbon dated it, and because it was underwater for so long 00:51:00.420 --> 00:51:05.540 and then also exposed to sea water, as sea level rose over that cave, 00:51:05.620 --> 00:51:09.300 um, there's some question about the dating. 00:51:09.300 --> 00:51:13.900 A good friend of mine was involved in it, he's really good at radiocarbon dating. 00:51:13.900 --> 00:51:20.540 It was in National Geographic a few months ago. There was a cover story on the first Americans that 00:51:20.540 --> 00:51:27.440 talked about some of our work on the islands, but the cover, and much of the discussion was about 00:51:27.440 --> 00:51:32.060 that woman skeleton from that cave. So if you could go back and look at that or the 00:51:32.060 --> 00:51:35.600 National Geographic website I think you'll find out more. 00:51:35.600 --> 00:51:41.980 Um, my recollection is that they concluded it was between 12 and 13,000 years old. 00:51:41.980 --> 00:51:49.040 But they couldn't be more certain than that and it's, it's, what the media usually does is take the oldest date 00:51:49.100 --> 00:51:54.280 that you hear and then that just gets repeated over and over again, so it could be 13,000, but 00:51:54.280 --> 00:52:01.860 I don't think its 14,000. But its still really old. And really well preserved. It's quite a find. 00:52:04.960 --> 00:52:11.820 (audience member) So my question is related to your paleo ecology reference to, uh, the resources of the 00:52:11.820 --> 00:52:17.540 Chumash, we're getting, uh, in terms of water temperature, we know now how El Nino does 00:52:17.560 --> 00:52:20.880 effect kelp forest ecology 00:52:22.720 --> 00:52:30.880 In the past, in terms of the resources then they, is there a measure of the temperature, for example 00:52:30.900 --> 00:52:38.040 that may have made this, the resources available to the Chumash. For example, were the red abalone 00:52:38.040 --> 00:52:45.420 ever [inaudible word] at different times and are accessible where pelagic fish, pelagic fish showing up 00:52:45.420 --> 00:52:50.560 later because water got warmer. Uh, is that temperature warming? 00:52:50.560 --> 00:52:57.400 (Erlandson) Yeah. That's a very good question about sea surface temperature changes and how they've changed 00:52:57.440 --> 00:53:02.520 through time and how those might have affected the availability of resources for the Chumash. 00:53:02.520 --> 00:53:09.040 And there are really good records of ancient sea surface temperatures. They come from the Santa Barbara basin, 00:53:09.040 --> 00:53:14.900 cores drilled into the bottom of the Santa Barbara basin where there are what we called varved sediments. 00:53:14.900 --> 00:53:20.780 It basically layers there, one per year. They change color every year depending on the season. 00:53:20.780 --> 00:53:29.460 And because it's, uh, a basin that has no oxygen in the bottom of it, it has tremendous preservation. 00:53:29.540 --> 00:53:38.540 So they can bring those cores up and analyze oxygen isotopes and diatoms and radial area, 00:53:38.540 --> 00:53:44.100 these micro organisms that are found in each layer and document the sea surface temperature and 00:53:44.100 --> 00:53:49.600 how it has changed through time. And they have shown, pretty emphatically, pretty clearly, 00:53:49.600 --> 00:53:52.880 that there have been significant changes through time. 00:53:52.880 --> 00:53:58.100 Like the El Ninos that we have now there have been El Nino shifts in the past , but there have also been 00:53:58.100 --> 00:54:03.240 broader, like millennial scale, thousand year periods when sea surface tempers were 00:54:03.240 --> 00:54:05.960 either warmer or sometimes colder. 00:54:06.040 --> 00:54:12.240 One of them was the Younger Dryas periods its called and it started about 12,900 years ago to 00:54:12.240 --> 00:54:19.480 about 11,800 years ago. And some of those shell middens at, on San Miguel Island 00:54:19.480 --> 00:54:22.240 that are 12,000 years old come from that time period, 00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:29.160 and the shellfish in them are cold water fauna. It's red abalones, which are still there, but there's also some 00:54:29.240 --> 00:54:31.920 chitons and things that are really from the north. 00:54:32.820 --> 00:54:38.440 And then there are other periods, 8,000 to 10,000 years ago when it appears sea surface tempers were 00:54:38.500 --> 00:54:44.580 a little warmer when the red abalones basically disappear along with those other cold water faunas. 00:54:45.220 --> 00:54:53.500 So there are definitely changes through time. They may, potentially, affect the distribution of kelp, 00:54:53.500 --> 00:54:59.540 but we don't think. We modeled the extent of kelp forest through time around the islands, we think they were 00:54:59.540 --> 00:55:07.620 actually much more abundant, uh, 14,000 to 10,000 years ago in that they've shrunk through time. 00:55:08.420 --> 00:55:15.400 Um, but it's a very good question; there are changes. The plot that I showed of red abalones 00:55:15.400 --> 00:55:19.740 shrinking through time, at the very bottom of that, if I was to bring it back up, 00:55:19.740 --> 00:55:27.360 you would have seen these bars that said "W," "C" and "neutral," and those are cold water periods, 00:55:27.400 --> 00:55:33.080 warm water periods and neutral periods, and when we look at changes in shellfish size through time 00:55:33.080 --> 00:55:38.420 one of the first things we look at is what was the water temperature and could that explain the 00:55:38.420 --> 00:55:40.600 change in size rather than human predation. 00:55:40.600 --> 00:55:46.360 So far, that doesn't, it appears to be to be human predation that is the main predictor. 00:55:46.360 --> 00:55:52.600 The other thing that we can do is we can take a mussel shell or an abalone shell that's 8,000 years old or 00:55:52.600 --> 00:55:59.640 1,000 years old and we can analyze, we take little drilled samples, and you can analyze 00:55:59.640 --> 00:56:08.940 the oxygen 18 isotope ratios. It's oxygen 18 to oxygen 16 and that tells you what the water temperature was, 00:56:08.940 --> 00:56:15.240 to within half a degree, plus or minus. And you can actually see the change through the year and we 00:56:15.320 --> 00:56:21.440 can determine what part of the year the shellfish were collected based on water temperature change. 00:56:21.440 --> 00:56:28.160 But it also shows you much broader changes across the archipelago at the same time, 00:56:28.740 --> 00:56:33.700 cold water on San Miguel Island, warmer water on Santa Cruz and then changes through time. 00:56:33.700 --> 00:56:38.820 So the, I mean the technologies that archaeologists can harness now are just phenomenal. 00:56:38.820 --> 00:56:44.100 The ancient DNA, the oxygen isotope, the carbon dating and other dating methods, 00:56:44.100 --> 00:56:49.640 you know we can ask questions now that archaeologists wouldn't have even dreamed of 50 years ago, and 00:56:49.640 --> 00:56:54.200 certainly couldn't have answered because the science is always changing. 00:56:54.380 --> 00:56:59.220 That's one of the reasons museums like this and my museum at the University of Oregon are so important. 00:56:59.220 --> 00:57:05.780 We archive those samples, basically forever, and as new scientific techniques are developed 00:57:05.780 --> 00:57:10.500 you can start to do analyses that you never even could of dreamed of before. 00:57:10.500 --> 00:57:15.060 So we're constantly going back to old museum samples and reanalyzing them to 00:57:15.060 --> 00:57:19.560 get more and newer information out of them. Great question. 00:57:24.100 --> 00:57:27.700 (audience member) I have a question about ber-ringe-ga, is that how you pronounce it, ber-ring-ia 00:57:27.700 --> 00:57:29.700 (Erlandson) Beringia (audience member) Beringia 00:57:29.700 --> 00:57:36.160 It covers a wider swath than I was aware of for a long time. It seems like its around the oceans and 00:57:36.160 --> 00:57:41.700 also north of the oceans, in like central Alaska going over into Siberian. 00:57:41.700 --> 00:57:48.500 Um, and I was looking at your charts of sea, of sea level depth and whether or not 00:57:48.500 --> 00:57:54.500 eight or ten waves of people that came across [background noise drowns out speaker] time between so 00:57:54.500 --> 00:58:00.960 there could have been waves coming down to the central United States and along the West Coast 00:58:00.960 --> 00:58:05.920 where there were gaps of thousands of years when nobody came down at all or nobody could get 00:58:05.920 --> 00:58:08.220 across land without a land bridge. 00:58:08.620 --> 00:58:16.600 Yeah. So the question is about Beringia and its extent and also is it possible that there was more than one 00:58:16.640 --> 00:58:19.960 wave of human migration into the Americas from Northeast Asia. 00:58:19.960 --> 00:58:28.620 And Beringia as its been reconstructed from sea level changes was as much as 1,000 to 1,500 km wide at 00:58:28.680 --> 00:58:36.340 its maximum. And then it shrunk over a period of about 10 to 12,000 years ago and then was fully submerged. 00:58:36.340 --> 00:58:45.840 But even today, in the middle of winter, Inupiat people can walk from Asia to Alaska, 00:58:45.840 --> 00:58:51.020 or dog sled or take a, you know, power sled at this point 00:58:51.020 --> 00:58:59.320 because it freezes over and so even after sea level rise submerged the central part of Beringia it was 00:58:59.320 --> 00:59:02.800 still possible to go back and forth without a boat in the winter. 00:59:03.180 --> 00:59:08.540 The archaeological and other evidence has long suggested that there were at least three migrations. 00:59:08.620 --> 00:59:14.780 One was this, maybe, initial coastal migration or maybe it was walking across Beringia, but it was early, 00:59:14.880 --> 00:59:22.520 14-15,000 years ago. There was probably another one. They call it the Nadiad people, 00:59:22.620 --> 00:59:28.820 Apalastic speaking peoples who most people think came maybe 9,000 years ago. 00:59:28.820 --> 00:59:35.680 And then there was another one 3,500 years ago when the ancestors of Eskimo people, Inuit, Inupiat peoples 00:59:35.720 --> 00:59:40.480 clearly came out of Northeast Asia and kind of swept across the Arctic. 00:59:40.480 --> 00:59:46.180 And its quite possible that there was interchange back and forth and there may actually have been more waves 00:59:46.180 --> 00:59:49.400 than those three. We just don't know for sure. 00:59:49.400 --> 00:59:55.780 The genetic data are providing a whole new way of analyzing these questions, and 00:59:55.780 --> 01:00:01.320 unfortunately you get these studies that are published where somebody emphatically says there 01:00:01.320 --> 01:00:06.440 was only one wave. And then somebody else will come along six months later and 01:00:06.440 --> 01:00:08.800 say emphatically there were five waves. 01:00:10.120 --> 01:00:16.380 And I just don't think we have enough data yet to really say, emphatically, anything of that kind. 01:00:16.380 --> 01:00:17.920 We need more information. 01:00:19.520 --> 01:00:24.600 But it clearly was a route that people have gone back and forth, I think, for many thousands of years. 01:00:26.200 --> 01:00:30.300 (moderator) And unfortunately that's all the time we have for questions tonight. 01:00:30.300 --> 01:00:35.020 I would like to just give another thank you to our speaker tonight Dr. Jon Erlandson [loud audience clapping] 01:00:35.020 --> 01:00:36.120 (Erlandson) Thank you!