[instrumental music for opening]
(Erlandson) Did I get that right? [pause] I always want to say Ventura County Museum, but the-
and the Museum of Ventura County. It's a wonderful institution. Channel Islands National Park,
as you know, is a real treasure among our National Parks.
And certainly a local treasure, of, I mean, beyond compare really.
I was born and raised in Santa Barbara. I spent some of my youth in Hawaii, but I
spent most of my youth in the Santa Barbara Channel.
I moved to the northwest, Pacific Northwest: Alaska, Seattle,
Oregon in about 1983, but ever since I did leave
I've been coming back, and I've been coming back primarily because of the Channel Islands,
because they're such a phenomenal place to work.
A place of incredible discoveries that continue year, after year, after year.
And I'm going to share of those with you tonight. [pause]
Um, there was, at least a little bit of confusion, I think, early-when I was asked to do this talk, or talks-
this is my third one in two days, actually.
And it-I think initially the thinking was I would talk about the peopling of the New World,
which is something I talk about a lot.
And it was advertised, or at least posted somewhere, about that.
This was my title (points at screen behind him) which says nothing about the peopling the New World.
And, when I realized there might be a little bit of confusion I decided, well, I'll talk about both.
And so what I've done is I've merged two lectures,
one, on the peopling of the New World in a very broad perspective, sort of a global perspective, that comes
to the Santa Barbara Channel and shows you why our research in the islands is, you know,
actually causing some fundamental changes, or certainly influencing some fundamental
changes, in our thinking about the first Americans.
And then I'm going to take the second part, and really talk about the history of the Channel Islands,
from a perspective known as historical ecology. And historical ecology is a rapidly developing
and young discipline that takes ecology-understanding ecosystems around the world-and
looks at them in a historical perspective.
Where we've combined paleontological, archeological, historical and ecological, or biological, information to
try to understand how ecosystems have changed through time,
how humans have impacted them through time,
and then also, how the changes in ecosystems have influenced changes in human societies.
The Channel Islands are one of, probably, one of a handful of really detailed study- studied areas
where the historical ecology is influencing our understanding of human impacts on
ancient island ecosystems and the implications of those impacts on the restoration and
conservation of modern ecosystems.
And so, I hope to all that together into a coherent package in about the next hour.
I talked yesterday at one o'clock. It took just about an hour, so bare with me
and I will be here for questions at the end.
[slide change] I was fortunate enough, at UC-Santa Barbara to study with a professor by the
name of Brian Fagen, who has probably written about 50 books, many of them are popular books
some of you might have read. He writes about archeology broadly for a general audience, and
he always suggested, wisely I think, that Jon-and to his other students-
when you give a talk, or you write a book, or you write an article, you should think about the big picture.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about what anthropological theory suggested
when I was in graduate school. This was the 1980's, I finished in 1988.
And as somebody who grew up on the ocean, in the ocean, of California and Hawaii:
swimming, sailing, surfing, diving-all those things,
I always found the the theory of anthropology of the 1960's, '70's, 80's and 90's really strange, but it's
what I was taught in graduate school. And here's just two quotes:
one of them is a really ancient one, from 1868, by Louis Henry Morgan, who was sorta the first
anthropologist and deep historian. And he wrote, "from continental to island life the
change for the worse is very great with respect to opportunities and incitements to progress."
In other words, I think, sorta saying, you know "islands suck!" [audience laughs]
If you go to an island, you're going to be isolated, you're going to be remote,
you're not going to have as many resources,
you're not going to have the same opportunities that you would have in a mainland.
Now much later, actually a good friend of mine, at University of Alaska-Anchorage,
David Yeszner, in '87 wrote, "It is a historical fact
that maritime resources were not exploited until relatively late in prehistory...
a real commitment to maritime life ways did not precede late Upper Paleolithic times."
What that means, is about 15,000-years-ago.
In the broader scope of human evolution, where hominids-our ancestors-have been around for a million,
two million, three million years? This suggests, that people didn't fish,
build boats, go to sea, or really even live along coastlines until the last
one-tenth of one percent of human history.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of human history was though, basically, that humans did not exploit
marine resources or aquatic resources. Seems kinda strange to me, but who was I, as a
undergraduate or graduate to question these, sort of, authoritative quotes. [slide changes]
Well those [long pause] views, I think, those perspectives on the human history of the sea, or the
role of the sea in human prehistory, as being a very recent phenomenon for most of the 20th century,
also influenced our views about the peopling in the Americas and the first Americans.
Many of you who probably know the story of the ice-free corridor, Clovis First,
the ancient Clovis culture, that was supposed to be
the very first Americans in the picture.
Again, when I was in graduate school until relatively recently, was that people
marched out of Northeast Asia, across a land bridge of Beringia that was a 1,000 km wide,
exposed by glacial conditions, where sea levels were much lower than today,
and then marched through Canada, the Yukon and down an ice-free corridor
into the very center of the continent, where they started hunting mammoths and mastodons,
and camels and horses. And there were cave lions and saber-toothed cats roaming around.
And, you know, it's an incredible story. It's a wonderful story. And it dominated the 20th century.
The ice-free corridor probably wasn't ice-free at all.
When it did open, it was surrounded 15,000 km wide, a sinuous, narrow corridor
that led to the plains of central North America.
It did exist, about 13,000 years ago it opened up, but the
idea back in the '60's, 70's, 80's and even the 90's was that then these people
focused on hunting what we called the mega fauna, the now extinct Pleistocene mega fauna, and
they didn't move to coastlines, like the Pacific Coast, the Gulf Coast, or the East Coast until much later. [pause]
And even when they arrived-maybe 9,000 years ago, is what I learned in graduate school-
-along the coast of California. It took them literally millennia, thousands of years,
to figure out that coastlines were productive, how to fish, to eat shellfish, how to hunt sea mammals, and that
they really; fully maritime cultures, like the Island Chumash or the Mainland Chumash,
that we all know a little bit about. These really sophisticated fishing cultures
they didn't develop until maybe, 3,000-2,000 years ago, something like that.
That was the picture when I was in graduate school.
Things have changed a lot since then.
And the point I make on the left there, is that this was the traditional view, it was a very terrestrial view, and
those Clovis First models made the Pacific Coast, the Santa Barbara Channel, and in fact, Ventura County
essentially irrelevant to the study of the peopling of the Americas. [pause]
[slide changes]
Well, I'll put this last slide just to show you where things were at in 1990.
And this one is by C. Melvin Aikens, who is a very good friend of mine,
my mentor at the University of Oregon. He's my predecessor as director of the
Museum of Natural and Cultural History there, and so I always feel a little bit bad
exposing what he said in 1990, when he said, "The idea that early people adapted to a maritime
lifeway might have first entered America along the Northwest Coast (this is the Coastal Route) is not
just unlikely, [pause] not just improbable, but imponderable." Essentially unthinkable.
I don't think he believes that anymore, but you know, actually, I haven't asked him in for a while.
[slide changes]
So before I go any further, I want to make it really clear, that my personal history:
the filter through which information goes through my brain and comes out the other end-
when I'm writing, when I'm thinking, might lead me to question some of these conclusions.
This is really full disclosure. I grew up surfing, and um, this was a boat I built as an undergraduate with my
old buddy, Mike Macko. It's a replica of a Chumash boat, not a redwood tomol, that they're so famous for, but
sort of the poor man's boat, the estuary boat, it was called a caswahl e tomol,
which is whole bunch of cattails-not cattails-um, tule, from the estuary,
that are bundled up, lashed together, and then coated with asphaltum.
We were going to try a Channel crossing in this thing. [audience laughing]
In 1978, we took it on a test voyage from Gaviota beach to El Capitan, about 12 miles.
It was great, but it soaked up a lot of water. It was very slow. It was unsinkable, we thought.
But we pulled it out of the water, and then we're gonna come back and get it and paddle further the next day.
Some kids took it back in the water into heavy surf and it ended up washing down the beach and
breaking up on the rocks. It was a lot of work wasted, but on the other hand,
I didn't have to try and paddle that thing across the Santa Barbara Channel. Which might have been a good thing.
[slide changes]
So, my perspective, especially after 30 or 40 years of studying maritime cultures in various
parts of the world; marine fisheries, marine ecosystems, is that in fact,
this photo out of National Geographic, the oceans are in fact basins of plenty.
And the ecology, history and archeology tell us that coastlines and near shore marine
ecosystems can be remarkably productive. They're not universally productive,
not everywhere, not always, but they are usually realtively productive because they
provide resources from both the land and the marine habitat: the coast, the sea, estuaries.
They're what we call ecotones. Where an incredible diversity and often an incredible
richness of resources are available to ancient humans.
And that diversity can provide a greater stability to human economies.
And so the question is, why would early humans ignore coastal ecosystems for 99.9 percent of human history?
This is what I was taught in graduate school. That they did, that they ignored them.
[slide change]
Well, eventually I also took a lot of geology classes.
And geologists had been warning anthropologist for decades, that costal archeological
records were fundamentally biased. That they weren't representative. And the reason for that is
that we live at the end of the Pleistocene. Here's part of the Pleistocene: 900,000 years to modern.
And, as you know, the Pleistocene is the period of Ice Ages. With ice sheets forming and melting and
sea levels rising and falling. And that's what this is-
is sea level over 800,000 years. Going up and down, over and over and over again.
Here's the modern situation-there-no, that's 50 meters. So... [long pause]
So, well, let's go here for the modern. OK. This is the last 140,000 years. This is what we call the last inter-glacial.
When sea levels were four to six meters higher than today; globally.
Here's where we are today at zero, although, rising relatively rapidly again.
There are places in the world where sea level, for various reasons, of tectonics and other
things, have actually risen slightly larger than present. In the last few thousand years.
But generally, this is where they are.
And if you look down here. As recently as 18,000-20,000 years ago, sea levels were 120 meters below present.
That's almost 400 feet. And the effect on that, is,
when you drop sea level 400 feet, the shoreline in many places, is,
sometimes 5,000 kilometers further away from where it is today. In some cases,
it's only a few kilometers, but those are rare. Along the California coast,
which is a relatively steep coast, because its a leading edge of a tectonic plate-and I
don't need to get into the details of that-
but we're a relatively steep coastline compared to say that of a trailing edge of a plate,
which is the East Coast of North America.
And here, over the last 20,000 years, shorelines have often moved only 10, 15, 20, 25 km-something like that.
But that still creates a fundamental problem.
If you want to go back, say 15,000 years ago, when we think humans first entered the Americas today.
15,000; 16,000; maybe 17,000 years ago, you're here and there are no shorelines
virtually anywhere that you can go to and find sights of that age, because they are all underwater.
They are often under hundreds of feet of water, they're often far offshore, and it's
extremely challenging to find them. And there is virtually, almost no work that's been done,
off the Pacific Coast of North America to find those submerged sites. It's only just beginning.
As I'll show you at the very end. So the other problem, is that on a global level,
the last time sea levels were where they are today was 120-130,000 years ago.
That's where you might expect to find, what we call shell middens, occupational debris of coastal peoples, or
coastal occupations still above sea level today.
The problem in the Americas is that there weren't any humans in either Americas, or Australia at that time, or
most the oceanic islands around the world. Then there is this great gap in coastal records
that exists right here: when it's below 50 meters, below 30 meters, where there's almost
no hope of finding coastal sites of that age.
So really, archaeologists when they think about the deep history of sea faring, of fishing peoples, of coastal
hunter-gatherers, we're looking at just the tip of the iceberg. Sea levels have been 50 meters, or lower
than they are today, for about 90% of the Pleistocene.
This just gives you an idea on a global level how difficult it is to understand the archaeology, or the
deep history of fishing and coastal peoples.
[slide changes]
A few years ago, on sabbatical, I was lucky enough to go to South Africa, where they have
really the world's earliest shell middens, and
these are associated with anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, people like us.
And there, they go back far enough, that you can get back to 124,000 or 164,000 years
and still find occasional shell middens that haven't been destroyed by coastal erosion and things like that,
that also cause problems with coastal archeological records.
But it's now well established in South Africa
that there is a middle Stone Age complex there, where people were collecting lots of shellfish,
they were hunting or scavenging lots of seals,
they were taking penguins, marine birds, and they were probably also fishing at times
in their interior rivers, where it looks like they had harpoons; where they were harpooning big Nile perch.
So what I've said at the top is, we now can see evidence in Africa and parts of Eurasia
that coastlines, if you include lakeshores, they were occupied by Homo habilis, by Homo erectus, by
Neanderthals. And there is some evidence that our ancestors in those areas were
fishing, they were using aquatic resources, but it's relatively limited.
And I believe it was probably limited by technological limitations.
What happens with the middle Stone Age and the appearance of homo sapiens, those people like us,
that there is an explosion in technological innovation, wherever those Homo sapien peoples are.
The first boats appear, the first nets appear, the first woven technologies appear.
There's a whole series of technologies that have never been seen anywhere among our ancestors, that in
the middle Stone Age they appear. And associated with that, are [pause] it seems, the
appearance of more shell middens and much more intensive fishing and use of aquatic resources.
And these are the folks, Homo sapiens, that then spread out of African and spread around the world,
[slide changes]
and carried with them, these new technologies that allowed them to colonize islands in a
systematic way during the Pleistocene. To fish in offshore areas, to collect lots of shellfish, and
hunt sea mammals in ways they could never do before.
This is a map that's probably ten years old, but, you know, it basically tells the story that's still largely true.
This is anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens, and the genetic viewpoint that they spread out of Africa,
somewhere around 70,000 years ago. Spread virtually around the world. And everywhere they went, if there
were earlier hominids, like Homo erectus or Neanderthals, they replaced them.
Every other hominid species has disappeared after this radiation of 70,000 years ago.
The interesting thing about the genetic data is it suggests something that the archaeological data so
far hasn't been able to, because of the problem with rising sea levels. It suggests that one
route that Homo sapiens took followed the southern coast of Asia, into Island Southeast Asia,
following something called the southern dispersal route.
The coastlines of India, Pakistan, ultimately ending up in Island Southeast Asia, or what we call Wallacea, and
there they clearly had boats. For the first time there was clearly systematic, seafaring crossing of substantial
water gaps and colonization of numerous islands, including the island of Australia.
And also islands up here in Western Melanesia. [slide change]
And these, you can see, this is Island Southeast Asia today, but with lower sea level. This cross hatching
shows you where the land used to be. But once they got out to about here, they had to start using boats.
And they made a series of crossings, no matter which way you take them, they had to make somewhere
between eight, nine, sometimes ten water crossings. And many of them were 80, 90 or 100 km wide, and in
some cases they were people getting in boats and going straight out to sea where they couldn't see land.
Now they might have known because of the flight of birds, or perhaps a wildfire on an offshore
island that sent up a plume of smoke. They may have known there were islands there.
But when you are on the water, you're looking at nothing but ocean. And there heading out and colonizing
island after island after island, out here into western Melanesia, spreading around the coastlines of Australia.
It's and amazing story! Spreading up into the interior, into Lake Mungo, and these lakes that no longer exist.
They're all dry today. But there are fishing sites there with thousands of fish bones, and shellfish, and human
burials and cremated remains that date to 40-45,000 years.
Something really fundamentally different happened with the appearance of modern humans like us,
Homo sapiens, and their spread around the world with these new technologies. [slide change]
So now I just have the top of Australia and New Guinea, which was all connected as one continent called Sahul
back at that time. But I've shown you a series of stars here that represent locations where we can document
archaeologically Pleistocene seafaring. And you can see I've added a few up here. This is Japan at
28,000-30,000 years ago. These are what are called the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa, right about there
Taiwan was connected to the Asian mainland at times of low sea level, as Japan was, but the
Ryukyus are in deep water and they were making Pleistocene seafarings crossings of 150-175 km there
as early as 35,000-36,000 years ago.
And then we know that Homo sapiens in Japan was going offshore to islands to collect obsidian,
a tool stone, a really high quality tool stone, by at least 28,000-30,000 years ago.
And over here on the Channel Islands, as I'll show you, they were using boats to get to the Islands 13,000
years ago. Northwest Coast up here, British Columbia, Southeast Alaska colonizing islands as early as 12,000
years ago, maybe even more. And what I've done then is ask one of my rhetorical questions.
After 17,000 years ago when the world started to warm, when the ice started to melt, and
glaciers started to retreat from coastlines along the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere up here,
and Pacific Ocean water started to warm as well. What was to stop maritime peoples living in the Japanese
archipelago from continuing right up through the Cural Islands, Camchapca, probably not,
these were very difficult gaps, to get the Aleutians, but the shores of Beringia were here.
What was to stop them from just carrying on right around the North Pacific Rim?
[slide change]
And this gets down to not the Clovis First, but the alternative. One was called, initially,
the Coastal Migration Theory. Really fully developed first in the 1978-79 by an archaeologists by the
name of Knut Fladmark at University of British Columbia. And at the time he argued that at
least it's possible that people didn't take the ice-free corridor route, they came around the costal route,
and it was very marginal. I had an advisor who suggested that I not write about it in my dissertation.
Actually suggested I could ruin my career. I didn't listen to him, er, but I did do it cautiously in my
dissertation and the book that came out. And I've always, actually, tried - even though I'm an advocate
for studying this theory and these hypotheses-I've continued to try and keep an open mind,
but try to find funds, and do the research on the Channel Islands and elsewhere that
can help test whether this theory/hypothesis is true.
[pause]
In 2001, I was invited to come down to my hometown
by a bunch of biologists and ecologists who were studying the history of human impacts on
marine ecosystems and marine fisheries. And it included a small group of kelp forest
biologists who wanted me to talk to them about the history of human use and exploitation in kelp forest
systems. And I had been doing [slides change] -whoops, sorry- I had been working on the Channel Islands for
some years. I'd been working up in Alaska, up here, kelp forest in both areas.
I'd worked on the Oregon coast where there's kelp forrest. Kodiak Island. The Alaska Peninsula.
Always working on archeological sites that were adjacent to kelp forest, so I knew a little
bit about kelp forest biology and ecology, but these guys did it for a living.
And they were extraordinary. They've studied kelp forest all around the world. And the more we
talked about the kelp situation in the North Pacific, in the North Pacific Rim, what I didn't realize in my
experience here was that there is also kelp all the way into the Bering Sea , I knew it was in the Aleutians,
but I didn't know it continued all the way down into the Japanese archipelago. This is actually from Newsweek,
I think, and they got it wrong. There's not kelp down here. Although there might have been some in the
last glacial maximum when things were cooler. And then interestingly enough, after
a gap in the tropics, where it turns out, in just in the last ten years they've realized there are deep water kelps
offshore. There's kelp forest all the way down here, around the Andean coast and the southern cone.
And the macrocysstis, or giant kelp, that we have here off the coast of California, is also found down here.
And so as we talked about kelp forest ecology, and humans, and how they used kelp forests,
one of the guys that I was working with, his name is Bob Steneck from the University of Maine,
and we were talking about the Coastal Migration Theory, and he said, "My God! It was like a kelp highway."
And I was like kelp highway, hmmm. Now that sounds kind of trendy. But I'd been writing about the Coastal
Migration Theory at that point for about 20 years, 15 years maybe.
And you know, there's always a little bit of a tension. And then we called it the kelp highway.
And it was in Newsweek. And it was in movies. And, you know, to me it really proved the power of marketing.
Coastal Migration Theory doesn't sounds that interesting, but a kelp highway,
kinda captured people's imaginations. And there's been a lot more attention to that, and
a lot of people now call it the Kelp Highway Hypothesis instead of The Coastal Migration Theory. It's actually a
simplification, I think, but I'll tell you a little bit more about it, [slide changes] as soon as I tell you about
a key discovery that was made near the Pacific Coast in central Chile.
This is a site that was dug in the 1970's, first published in the late '80's, and a huge monograph that,
that a lot of people, I think were convinced, that the Monte Verde II site, as it's known, was, in fact,
older than Clovis. This is the first site in the Americas that broke the Clovis barrier.
And Tom Dillehay did this amazing work at this water logged site that had outstanding preservation of wood
and plant remains - it's very unusual. And the interesting thing about this is,
in 2008 they published a paper about a small structure that they found, that they thought was probably
like a shaman's structure, or a medicine man's house. A very small hut that had a lot of plant
remains that looked like they were medicinal.
But what they also found there was eight types of kelp and seaweed that were preserved, that had been
carried from the coastline, either the outer coast that was about 15 km away, or
an estuarian coast that was about 10 km away.
And then probably dried and stored in this little hut.
And they dated the kelp and seaweed, and it comes out to about 14,000 years.
That's a 1,000 years before Clovis and it's 10,000 km south of Clovis, along the Pacific Coast of Chile.
This was a watershed moment, really, for The Coastal Migration Theory and The Kelp Highway Hypothesis
because it, it just, you know, it made no sense anymore. Clovis First made no sense.
The best data that we had at that time suggested that the so-called ice-free corridor hadn't
even opened by 14,000 years ago. So how did they get to Chile? Well, maybe they took boats.
[slide changes]
A little bit more about kelp forests and why I think The Kelp Highway Hypothesis may actually have some legs,
other than the fact that some of the earliest sites along the coast of North America
are associated with kelp forest and have lots of kelp forest resources with them.
What's interesting about the kelp forest all around the North Pacific Rim is that they're extremely productive.
They grow very rapidly, they put out, literally, billions of spores that feed really complex,
rich, and biodiverse food webs. [pause]
And also, in a paper we published in 2015, we cataloged, or listed, over a hundred species of shellfish,
fish, sea birds, marine mammals, seaweeds. I think that's it. Christina, did I get them all?
Over a hundred of these species, or genea[stumples on word] genera, a genus and a species,
that are either exactly the same species, or the same genera, meaning they are very closely related,
that exists, can be found in Japan, and Alaska, and California. The same species like sea otters,
or sea urchins, or abalones, or mussels, or dozens of fish and marine mammals can be found in Japan,
and Alaska, and California. And the implications are, of that are, that this route around the North Pacific Rim
not only would have been entirely at sea level, without major obstructions, once the ice retreated, but
the ecology of that area would have been extremely similar. The marine ecology, the near shore
marine ecology, with the basic, same resources.
And so if you knew how to be a maritime hunter-gatherer person in Japan, you would have known how to do it in
Alaska, and you would have known how to do it in California, immediately.
If you contrast the coastal route with the interior route, you have to go through an incredible diversity of
ecosystems. You have to cross mountain ranges. You might have to cross glaciers.
You encounter, you know, boreal forests, tropical forests, deserts, and lots of geographic barriers.
So from an ecological perspective, it would have been much easier to travel along the margins
of the North Pacific Rim than to take an interior route all the way from, say Beringia, to the
southern cone of South America. That was our argument anyway. [slide changes]
So now let me shift to our home ground here. Ventura County, Santa Barbara Channel, and the
And Northern Channel Islands. [slide changes] And the first thing I want you to know about the Channel
Islands is what they looked like when sea levels were lower. Our best information now suggests that
shorelines never got much beyond about 105 or 110 meters below present in this area.
But when you drop sea level that far. This is that second one [indicates on slide]
Look at San Nicholas Island. It's much larger than it is today, maybe four or five times larger.
There are islands out here that don't even exists today. Tanner Bank was Tanner Island.
Cortes Bank was Cortes Island. San Clemente, Santa Catalina. They're all still separated from the mainland.
And look at the four northern islands. Many of you probably know this story. They were all united as one
large island, 125 km long. We call it Santarosea.
The ancient, northern Channel Island.
Separated by only six to eight km from the mainland. Much less than today.
Look at the Ventura plain area, how broad it was. When you get on an Island Packers boat and go out to
Anacapa, or go to Santa Cruz Island, you get about half way there and you get somewhere close to the first
oil platform. That's where the shoreline was. The mainland shoreline.
There is a vast underwater landscape off
the Ventura, Santa Barbara and Channel Islands coasts that was dry land when the first humans got here.
And that's where we're going to find the evidence of the first Americans that came down the Pacific coast.
It's very challenging, um, and it's maybe the last frontier for coastal archaeology.
But we're just getting started on that.
Um, okay. [slide changes]
Now let's focus in on the Northern Channel Islands.
So, here again is the Ventura coastal plain. Big, sub-marine canyon here. I think that's the Hueneme canyon.
Here are the shorelines about 12,500 years ago in brown. So this is 500 years after Clovis.
Eleven thousand years ago in tan. And these are rough representations of where the shoreline was.
You can see that by 11,000 years ago, Anacapa is breaking off from Santarosea, but the
three main islands, the larger islands, remain connected until about 9,000 years ago.
[pause] We've been studying this, what I call a paleo-geography of the Channel Islands, what they used to
look like and then trying to predict where we would find early sites off shore. And we're doing that, in part,
by finding early sites on land and then documenting what land forms people were
living by and then trying to find those underwater, as predictors of where they might be under water.
One of the places that we're going to look intensively in the next few years off shore is right here-
it's called the Santa Cruz channel. And there's a large sub-marine canyon that comes right up there.
And I've dubbed this; actually Christina, my wife, suggested this name and I thought it was a great idea.
I was coming up with all kinds of really stupid names; South Bay, you know, things like that.
She suggested Crescent Bay, which is perfect, because as I'll show you in a little bit there is a very distinctive
chip stone tool type called a crescent. Looks like a crescent moon or a half moon usually.
And we're finding them all around the margins of what would have been Crescent Bay, between about 9,500
years ago and 13,000 years ago. And those are dated between, at least 12,000 years and 8,000 years ago.
They're reliable indicators of what we call paleocoastal people, where they used to live.
[slides change]
Hit that one a little too hard.
[slides go back]
OK, so, a really amazing find was found by Phil Orr, at the Santa Barbara Museum of National History,
a long time ago. 1959. And that discovery, many of you have probably heard about, is Arlington Man.
Three leg bones. Not a skeleton, but just small parts of one person's leg. It was called Arlington Man for years,
and then somebody decided it was a woman, so it became Arlington Woman.
And then another bio-[stumbles on word] biological anthropologist studied the remains and decided,
"no, it's actually a man." So it's gone from Arlington Man to Arlington Woman and now back to Arlington Man.
When Phil Orr found it, he found it at the bottom of an old channel. You can see parts of it right there.
There is a soil that went down into this gully. [laser pointer focuses on center] Found it right at that level.
Thirty seven feet below the surface of this terrace, there's this old Jeep, and it was found in C2.
He brought scientists, top scientists, from around America, who confirmed that it was in C2.
Recommended that he take it out in a block of sediment, which he did. That block of sediment was at Santa
Barbara Museum of National History for many years. The work that Phil Orr did suggested that Arlington Man
died, probably accidentally, or was- and his remains were washed into
the bottom of this gully about 10,000 years ago.
That alone was very different than what most people believed at that time. And there was a lot of skepticism
about the true age of Arlington Man for decades. John Johnson, who I went to graduate school with and is
a good friend, is at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History now, and he and his team have
re-dated Arlington Man's remains, with permission from the Chumash Tribe,
and also gone back-they haven't found any additional remains-but they've cleared all this off and
they've cored these deep sediments. So they've done some really outstanding work on the Arlington
Springs locality. And they've shown, pretty much categorically, I think, that it's 13,000 years old.
Ten thousand years for Phil Orr was before we understood that you have to calibrate radiocarbon
dates in a variety of ways and when you do that they get older. When they are 10,000 years old,
they get pushed back further. But it's pretty clear that Arlington Man died about 13,000 years ago.
That's basically right in the middle of the Clovis period.
Which lasted about 250-400 years. From 13,200 to 12,800 years.
So this is Clovis age, but on the Channel Islands, had to have boats to get there.
The question, again a rhetorical question, is, "was he a Clovis person?"
And unfortunately there were no artifacts, really, no diagnostic artifacts that tell you
how old the person was or what technological complex he was associated with, so its been a
question that's been largely left unanswered. They've tried to get ancient DNA out of those remains
and been unsuccessful so far.
And I would have told you ten years ago, that this was almost certainly a Clovis person.
Because there have a few Clovis points, these distinctive, fluted points that are 13,000 years old
found along the Santa Barbara coast and other parts of the California coast. Just a handful.
But he's Clovis age, so he must have been Clovis because everybody thought Clovis was first.
Well we've now done a lot of work on the Channel Islands, and as I'll show you, you've found new
localities where we found hundreds and hundreds of bifacial tools, made by what we call
paleocoastal people. And not one of them is Clovis.
And there are museum collections around the world, and on the East Coast, and here in California
that were artifacts collected by the first people who mapped the Channel Islands.
When there was a lot of erosion and they collected a lot of things, a lot of artifacts,
there is not a Clovis point among them.
And I believe today that the first Americans and the first Channel Islanders were not Clovis, but something else.
[slide changes]
In the 1990's when the National Park Service asked me to work at Daisy Cave, which is
a site on San Miguel Island that was eroding. [pause] And had an amazing record, a very long record, of
human occupation spanning about 11,500 years.
And in this case, Arlington Springs is back here somewhere. The two islands were connected.
So the people who lived here could see Arlington Springs, and walk there, or go by boat.
Daisy Cave has this just amazing record of stratified deposits. [laser points to images at bottom of screen]
This is 3,000 years old, this is 6,600 years old, this is 8,600 years old.
That's 10,000 years old and down here is a soil with
just a few pieces of shellfish remains and a handful of artifacts that's about 11,500 to 700 years old.
A really incredible record with great preservation. Around 10,000 years ago we have these bone bi-points,
that are fishhooks. Simple, straight fishhooks.
Olivella shell beads.
There's cordage made out of sea grass that's preserved there. Even a couple woven fragments
that look like they were probably sandal fragments.
This enigmatic little point, which was found in the 1960's by the first person to excavate Daisy Cave.
It's called a Channel Islands barb point and it wasn't really recognized until the 1980's,
when Mike Glassow, one of my mentors at UC-Santa Barbara, found points just like that on Santa Cruz Island,
in a stratified context that dated to about 8,500 years old. I had seen pictures of this and
I always assumed, because its tiny, and it looks like a relatively recent point,
that it probably fell into the deeper layers when they were excavating or it somehow had been
mixed into the lower levels. But Mike Glassow showed me a picture of the ones he was finding on Santa Cruz.
Said, "have you ever seen one of these before?" And I was like, "yeah, I have! There's one at Daisy Cave."
And it supposedly came from very deep in the sequence, but it couldn't be dated securely.
But we now know that that was probably deposited there around 11,000 or 11,500 years ago.
And that knowledge, almost by itself, opened a door-a new understanding-of all these museum collections
that are around the world that are full of these little points that people picked up in the 1870's and 1880's
when they were mapping the islands. And we always assumed they were Chumash arrow points
that probably date to the last 2,000-3,000 years.
Well, it turns out they are much older than that. [slide changes]
And much more interesting than that.
Once we got done working at Daisy Cave and a cave nearby, on the northeast coast,
we started span-[drops word] spreading out on San Miguel Island. And just dating sites no matter what
they looked like. They looked-we thought they were in early context. And what we did is;
I studied basically the record of where the few early sites on the islands that were known.
Where they were located. And they were always by springs, or in caves, or where there was
a type of tool stone. Chert, for instance, that was used to manufacture things like Channel Islands
barb points and crescents. And we just started wandering around looking at the eroded landscape of
San Miguel and just taking a tiny shell fragment every time we found one of these sites
that looked like it might be early. Sending it off to a lab. Getting a carbon date. And within a decade
we had found 50 sites on San Miguel that date between 12,200 and 8,000 years ago.
These range from small campsites to lithic workshops. To relatively large middens, including some
that are 10,000 years old that look like they were occupied year round by
sedentary people, a long time ago. And caves and open air settings.
Once I realized how many of these early sites there were on San Miguel, and almost every time we go to
San Miguel we find a couple more. And remember that the shorelines of that time period were way out here,
and we're missing most of the landscape that these maritime peoples would have been living in.
Again, we're looking at the tip of the iceberg. The number of sites suggested to me, for
the first time-maybe a decade ago-that this suggests that there were a lot more people on the islands
than we used to think. And that they were there a lot earlier than we used to think.
[slide change]
Among those early sites is one that I found accidentally when I was taking a short cut.
Um...
I went to get some equipment. My son and one of my grad students was working down here, on a
much more recent site. And I cut across this eroded area instead of taking the trail.
And I immediately started to find these bifaces, these chip stone tools that are flaked on both sides.
And this turned out to be a very large site. Its 600 meters long and 350 meters wide.
And we found two or three related sites nearby that would make it even larger.
What's important about this site is that eroding out of, underneath this cholychee is an
old beach deposit that has chert cobbles in it.
And it was attracting people to come up and get the chert cobbles, break 'em up, and
then make tools out of them. It was basically a lithic workshop where people were
occasionally camping and leaving behind some shellfish remains that were heavily eroded.
But we were able to find four or five different spots where there were still some in tact remnants of the
remnants of the campsites with shell fish.
Dating the shellfish we showed that these sites were occupied between 12,200 and 11,400 years ago.
And they produced these extraordinary points. Here's some Channel Islands barb points. [on slide]
These are crescents. [wide, curved example on slide] Particularly, kind of a centric varieties of crescents.
I'll show you some you some more typical lunate ones in a minute.
And then these are what I call a'mol points. [last example on slide]
A'mol means "old" or "ancient" in Chumash language.
And these are, they're all stemmed points. [points to both pointed tools] These are stemmed [points to right]
These are stemmed [points to left], but these don't have the barbs and they are usually serrated.
And I'll show you one in a little while that's just incredible workmanship.
[pause followed by slide change]
So we documented those sites and then with my former student, who is now at the Smithsonian, Torrey Rick,
we started looking for similar sites on Santa Rosa Island, um, working cooperatively with
the Park Service, Channel Islands National Park.
And one day we had finished our surveys. There wasn't enough vehicles, so we didn't have a car.
A couple Park Service biologists were going to this part of the island near Arlington that we'd never been to.
So we said, "sure, we'll go with you and we'll just take a walk in the park."
You know, walk down the coast from Arlington down here and just, you know, just sort of sight see-
see what we can find.
And there was a collapse, right in here. [points to middle of cliff on slide]
And we were walking along down here. [points to top of cliff]
But I had been in this general area in the late '80's, following in the footsteps of Phil Orr.
And I knew enough about the strata in here, that this well developed soil is several thousand years old.
Here is another soil, another soil, and then the soil down here. [highlights layers in soil]
It's the 5th soil down. I knew they were relatively old. And there was a collapse from coastal erosion.
And I climbed up. And right about here, [indicates middle, right area of cliff]
there was an exposed face of that deeply buried soil that was full of bird bones.
And they later found out that they were goose and duck bones mostly.
And there were chip stone tools, or artifacts, sticking out of the soil with them.
And Torrey, was down here, [indicating a lower layer] sorta going, "Oh that Erlandson, you know,
he's always looking at soils. What a waste of time."
And I said I'd found something and he started looking on this slope. And he started finding
Channel Island barb points. Little, tiny ones. And then a crescent. And then another barb point.
It was always, you know, it was an amazing day if you found five Channel Islands barb points.
That day, in three or four hours, I think we found 40 or 50 Channel Island barb points and about ten crescents.
We came back the next day, found more. We now have an assemblage of about 25 crescents and,
maybe 125 Channel Island barb points. And a lot more material than that.
This has turned out to be a really interesting site. It's 11,750 years old. There's another one nearby
that we found, prospecting after we found this one, that's about the same age and very similar.
[slide change]
And here's some of the things it's produced. These tiny, little barb points that are about that big.
They look like arrow points. They're probably not, but they look like arrow points.
This is the more traditional crescent. [wide pieces in middle] The quarter moon, half moon shaped thing.
Here's a couple of crescents. What we call preforms. They were making them, they broke, they threw
them away because it wasn't working.
Um. Red ochre. Bright red ochre with a sawn mark across it.
And red ochre is associated with anatomically modern humans and rock art where ever Homo sapiens goes
around the world. So that was pretty cool.
But really interestingly, these are mostly Canada geese and Snow geese bones. There were some fish bones.
There were seal bones. There was almost no shellfish. It was not well preserved.
And then down here is a burned bone of something called Chendytes lawri,
which is an extinct, flightless duck that I'll tell you more about in a little bit.
This is the earliest evidence for human hunting of Chendytes lawri anywhere along the Pacific Coast
of North America. What's interesting about those goose bones is that that's a winter arrival.
Those are migratory geese. In the summer they fly to Alaska, back then to Beringia. And then they come
back, and they were wintering in the Channel Islands. That suggests that these people,
almost 12,000 years ago, were probably living on the islands year round. They weren't just coming out
seasonally, they were there year round: winter, summer, fall, spring.
[slide changes]
And then, this is maybe the most amazing crescent I've ever found. And the most amazing a'mol point
that I've ever found. These are both relatively large for their types, and [pause]
I'm a flint knapper, I make stone tools. I just do it for fun. But I usually work in obsidian because
it's easy to flake, it's relatively easy to work. These cherts are quite difficult to work.
They are much harder. These have been intentionally heat treated 12,000 years ago,
which makes them more brittle, more like obsidian, but its still really hard to make something like this.
Look at how flat and thin they are. [highlights features on stone tools] Look at the needle like tip.
Look at the serrations on that. I mean, that's extraordinary flint knapping! Among the best
flint knapping anybody has ever seen in North America. [pause]
And I'm not the only one that says that. Anyway, incredible stonework.
[slide changes]
I want to tell you more about crescents. Here's that same crescent. [red circled item on slide]
And here's what we think it is.
Been a lot of debate about what crescents are. They're found over a large area of Western North American.
Not out here in Clovis county.
From Baja, Califonia; northern Baja; up into the Colombian Basin; Channel Islands; the central valley of
California has produced lots of them.
And then the dry lakes and marshes of the Great Basin are also rich sources of these artifacts.
They're usually associated with stemmed points of one variety or another, so they are part of what we call
a technological tradition called, the Western Stem Tradition or the Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition.
So what this does, is it links these first Channel Islanders technologically with a larger group of people
that were making similar stone tools for similar reasons.
We think that these were used as transverse projectile points. So they were hafted, probably on darts,
thrown with atladdles. And think about it. If you're hunting birds, as many people have
suggested these are for, you're often times shooting at a target like that [indicates picture of goose]-flocking birds
And if you take one of those tiny little CIB points on a dart and shoot it into that mass,
it's probably gonna miss. If you take a broad, blunt crescent and shoot it
you're much more likely to hit a wing, a neck, hit a bird, stun it, knock it down where you can retrieve it.
And geese and ducks are, you know, very rich sources of fat and protein. And so they have been widely hunted
by paleo-Indian peoples and other people around the world, a lot. The other thing that's extraordinary about
this is that it's on the Pacific Flyway. To Beringia and back, twice a year
Today, there are something like five to seven or eight million geese and ducks that travel that flyway.
A lot of them today take the Central Valley. Um, back when the Great Basin lakes were more full,
which would have been late terminal Pleistocene or an early Holocene. There was more rain fall.
The lakes and marshes were about ten to eleven times more extensive than today.
There would have been a huge habitat for geese and ducks, but the Pacific Coast itself is also a very
rich area for these migrating birds.
And it appears to me now that, in fact, these crescents are associated with an extremely rich
hunting tradition focused on water fowl and on the Islands, perhaps seabirds.
[slide changes]
One last point about that. This is roughly what North America looked like about 13,000 years ago.
Here you can see the ice-free corridor has opened. This is actually wrong, there is too much ice along the coast.
See, the coast would have been free of ice. Here's the big Great Basin lakes, much bigger than today.
And if you superimpose that area with crescents [small map pops up on slide] which is basically right in here.
[circles and points to West Coast of smaller map]
I think the reason there are crescents out west, and not out here with Clovis peoples, could be just a
technological tradition. Different peoples doing different things. But think about those flyways that I showed
you just before [goes back to earlier slide] Here's the Central Flyaway, the Mississippi Flyaway,
the Eastern Seaboard Flyaway. Now look where they're flying up here. [no indication of direction on slide]
For those three. [slide changes back to map] And then go here. [insert returns to slide]
There's nowhere for those birds to go.
So these flyaways probably didn't even exists back then. They would have been much more attenuative perhaps-
with birds feeding here. But they would have been much less rich than they are today, which
I think provides an ecological, interesting ecological explanation, for why there are crescents out here,
where they could go to Beringia, and why they aren't out here, where these birds have nowhere to go.
[slide changes]
OK. I started with a, fairly early in this, the first part of my talk with a rhetorical question about,
you know, why wouldn't people in Japan or East Asia, at the end of the Pleistocene, 17,000-16,000 years ago,
with atmospheric warming, oceanic warming,
why wouldn't they just have continued around the Pacific Coast? And how could we know if they did?
These are really interesting projectile points that come from Japan. The Jomon culture
precedes the Japanese themselves. It's a much older culture. The Ainu people in Japan are descended from
the Jomon. And in the terminal Pleistocene, starting about 16,000 years ago and to about 10,000 years ago,
they were making projectile points that look like this. They call them tang points, but they're stemmed.
They're barbed. They often have needle shaped points, as you can see.
And, I always have to put the caveat on that [slide insert appears] this is a cheap trick.
But now superimpose the Santa Rosa Island/Channel Island barb points on top of them.
And look how similar that looks to that. [compares two types of stone tips]
Or this looks to that. Or these are very similar looking, at least in a general way.
Now the big problem with these kind of comparisons is, it's all the way across the Pacific.
There's 10 or 20,000 km of shoreline between these two localities.
And there is also several thousand years difference.
And so it's a big stretch to say that these superficial similarities suggest
that our New World peoples actually came from Incipient Jomon and Japan. But it's possible.
And one of the things that was really interesting for me, just this last fall, was that I had a Japanese scholar
come to Eugene to study my Channel Island barb points from the Channel Islands.
And he spent his-he did his dissertation-on these points [subjects on white background] in the Incipient Jomon.
And he's not just a flint knapper, he's a lithic technologist, as we call it. He studies the details of
how people produced various stone tools. Much more sophisticated than anything I can do.
And he spent two days looking at our points. And I asked him, "Kenji, what's the most interesting
thing that you learned looking at these?" And he said, "I can't believe how similar they are."
He didn't think they would be. He thought, as I thought, these are just superficial outlines, but
the technology, the details of how they're made, he said is very, very similar.
I asked him a question that had been puzzling me for several years, and that was, if our
Channel Island barb point makers came from Japan and the Incipient Jomon, why don't they have
crescents in the Incipient Jomon? I asked him that and he said, "we do."
And I said I've looked at all your books, there are no crescents in there. And he said, "Well, they just don't
look quite like yours do." One of the things that typical of crescents is, in the middle, they're
ground on both edges. And the reason for that is when you lash them on something you don't want the sharp
edge of the tool to cut through the lashing. So you grind it and then you lash it. And it's very distinctive
and one of the reasons we think crescents were hafted like transverse points.
And he [Kenji] said, we have bifaces that are quite similar, they're just not crescent. They don't have a
concave edge. And they're also edge ground around the middle.
And so, perhaps he solved one of those questions that's been bugging me for years.
Okay [slide changes]
Well, so let's just look once again at the North Pacific. There's my a'mol point [circles center tool]
Here's a Channel Island barb point [indicates right tool]. There's the Incipient Jomon points, [indicates left tool]
16, 15, 14,000 years ago. This is 12,000. [highlights Channel Island barb on right]
Now we can fill this in, and I actually could actually go all the way down the Andean Coast, but
I don't have the space to do it. More stem points. In Kamchatke. [additional points appear at top]
And Siberia [adds another insert with stone point] between 13,000-14,000 years ago.
Those are in the interior, these are often found on salmon rivers, salmon run rivers.
[insert of white stone point on right] Here's a stem point that looks very similar, that was
found under the skull of something called the Buhl burial. Western stem technology with a 13,000
thousand year old burial in Idaho.
So they're stem points here, Lind Coulee, [yellow colored point] 12,000 years ago in Washington.
There have been stem points found 12,000 years ago, up in British Columbia along the coasts.
[Faded white point appears in bottom right corner] There are what we call fishtail points.
Stemmed, you can see the stem here. [highlights bottom portion of point] They're often times fluted.
And the Clovis fluted points are up here. [points to central United States]
[back to far right corner of map] These are down on the Isthmus of Panama. And I think it's at least possible
that these people crossed the Isthmus, moved up in the Gulf, and maybe a 1,000 years later became Clovis and
started the full fluting technology that's typical of Clovis points themselves.
And then down the Andean Coast we have points like this [new point at bottom]. Needle shaped tips,
sometimes barbed, at least shouldered, stem points and they date from, oh, 11,000 to almost 13,000 years.
So, you actually, can, you know, find traces of what may be the stem point tradition and a link to
a coastal migration around the Pacific Rim.
There are still some pretty big gaps, like right there. [points to Beringia area at top of map]
But remember this is where Beringia was and it's all flooded. That whole coastline is underwater on
the floor of the Bering Sea. Very difficult to study.
There are some genetic data that have been coming out, mitochondrial DNA data, from both modern
native peoples and also ancient skeletons. And the data are accumulating. They're still rather limited.
But there is some intriguing evidence and a haplotype called D4H3A. Pretty catching name, huh?
Easy to remember? [long pause] It's found in the Jamon. It's found in China.
It's found among coastal Native American peoples all the way around the Pacific Rim.
Mostly not out here, [indicates central United States] but along the coasts. [points to Pacific Coast]
It's found in South America in higher densities, than other types that we think are later
migrants into the New World. Interestingly enough, among living Chumash people
there have been five or six samples of D4H3A that have been found.
And they are often linked to, by geneticists, to a Coastal Migration Theory, or a coastal migration out of
the North Pacific-around the North Pacific.
[short, black point appears] And then, this one is interesting because it comes from Oregon.
Paisley Caves. Which is a site that is also pre-Clovis. It's the only North American site that is widely considered
and accepted among archaeologists to be pre-Clovis.
There, Dennis Jenkins, who works at my museum-has worked for years-and has documented 14,500
year old human feces. Coprolites. Desecated feces from which they've extracted human DNA,
Not D4H3A, interestingly enough, but they're associated, again, with stem points. Here's a stem point.
[refers to short, black point] It's been sawn for obsidian hydration dating. That one is about 13,500 years old.
And at this site there is no evidence for Clovis. It's Western stemmed only technology.
So I think there is a growing amount of evidence that this idea of a Coastal Migration Theory, maybe a
Kelp Highway Hypothesis, um, are in fact true. We haven't proven it yet. And one of the keys is
that all around the Pacific Coast we have not yet found a single site that's older than Clovis.
Arlington Man is the same age. But, I think, until we find a coastal site in North America,
a Pacific Coast site that pre-dates Clovis, there still will be people who doubt the Coastal Migration Theory.
[slide changes] There's a lot more work to be done. So conclusions of part one:
Around the world, coastlines have been important to our ancestors far longer than once believed.
Homo sapiens colonized numerous island groups by the late Pleistocene, including our Northern Channel Islands.
The Coastal Migration Theory and Kelp Highway Hypothesis, once marginal, have now become mainstream.
In a recent poll of American archaeologists, uh, I think about 75% of them said they thought the
Coastal Migration route was probably the first way that the first Americans came into the Americas.
And that's a complete sea change, a complete reversal, from 20-30 years ago.
And this puts the Pacific Coast, Santa Barbara Channel and Ventura County, instead of being peripheral to the
peopling of of the Americas, we're at ground central. That's exciting. The Northern Channel Islands,
and Santarosae in particular, were colonized by Paleocoastal people with boats
at the same time as Clovis peoples roamed the North America's interior. And the question that that raises is
with so many fewer land mammals on the islands, and so many fewer terrestrial plants to hunt and gather
than the adjacent mainland, why did Paleocoastal people settle Santarosae so early?
I think this has been surprising to a lot of people.
[end]