[Music]
so
[Music]
thank you thanks for coming and uh
this is my third time doing these sea to
shore lectures so the park keeps asking
me back so i i'm pretty encouraged by
that and i really love giving these
because you know there's a lot of great
research that goes on on the islands and
they are a gem
in the national park system and
the more people we can tell about the
great stories that come off these
islands and and
the exciting
uh things that we can learn from these
islands uh the better so i'm going to
talk a little bit about uh my most
recent project on the islands and before
i get started um
i've got all these
uh seals up here and and what i'm trying
to indicate is that this project is a
massive undertaking um it's the largest
of its kind
on the pacific coast of north america
and because of that there are a number
of really excellent scholars that are
involved i certainly you know i i'm the
pi on this project uh but
largely that means i do a lot of the
paperwork and i have a lot of great
scholars that are were collaborating
with in agencies that uh do tremendous
work and i'm gonna put their names up on
the end but um
much of this is not me
many of these ideas
are from the collaboration of many many
people so uh
let's get started here and but you
you'll have to forgive me on this is a
slide about something that has nothing
to do with what i'm going to talk about
today
i i have a new book that i'm going to
try to pedal on you uh there's flyers in
the back
uh this was mentioned shellfish for the
celestial we had a little title change
there at the midnight hour celestial
empire uh it
is the culmination of a decade of work
on the channel islands about the rise of
commercial fisheries in the advent of
the commercial fisheries that that were
started by immigrant chinese populations
that came over in the mid 19th century
as part of the gold rush and i um
it's written for a general audience uh
and i i you can pre-order a copy on
amazon or go to the university of utah
press
this will be partly a charitable
donation i just had a new my first child
three and a half weeks ago and so
every book that you buy gets me a half a
cup of coffee which makes me a better
parent so
go ahead and order one uh all right so
let's get started here and and since the
the season of of
uh
schools are starting back up again and
we're we're starting up again at the
university i thought we'd start with a
quiz to see how much you know and test
your knowledge here so here it is who
were the first americans a were they
clovis people
b clovis ancestors from siberia
c clovis ancestors from europe
d people unrelated to clovis or e
none of the above
anyone want to take a gander
i heard
d people unrelated to clovis okay
anybody else
e none of the above
you all fail
all right
the answer is f we just don't know all
right
sorry
so uh
i'm gonna give you the end of this talk
right at the beginning and the end is we
still don't know
we still don't know so this is a project
one of one of the goals of this project
is to to start to get to answer this
question or come close to answering this
question or
really take a step down the road towards
investigating this question of who the
first americans
were
but that the short answer is we still
don't know and we have a long way to go
before we get there
all right so but uh despite that we
we've known uh we've we've discovered in
in the last several decades and and many
archaeologists and scientists have come
to agree and come to a consensus on the
migrations of anatomically modern humans
around the globe
when and how they colonize different
continental landscapes at what times by
what routes
and so most are archaeologists most
anthropologists now agree that the the
the homeland the origins of
anatomically modern humans
were in africa and we have this spread
around the globe in a stepwise fashion
uh in these migrations to different
continental landscapes
and the last of these migrations in
terms of continental migrations and
colonizations was into north and south
america
but when that occurred
who made those migrations what routes
they took
we still just don't know and we have a
lot of a lot more questions than we have
answers and so what i want to do to
start is sort of take you through the
story
of how we thought we knew and how we've
gotten to know less than what we knew 20
years ago all right
and uh you know as we go through this
story it's not because archaeologists
were blind or we were uh railroaded or
we weren't looking in the right places
uh this is the process of science
working with the we we came up with uh
theories of that seemed to fit the data
and then the data change
and led us in a new direction and that's
where we are now all right so let's
begin in the 19th century uh
and sort of the first
questions about the origins of native
americans and when and
how they first colonized the new world
and for
most uh uh for most scientists claims
for the deep antiquity of the
colonization of the new world have long
been met with skepticism right so when
europeans first arrived and the leading
scholars of the day in the in the 19th
and early 20th century
most believe that native americans
reach the new world particularly north
america uh in the last 4 000 years
and i you know we can spend a whole
class or a whole lecture on this there's
a lot of reasons for this but this was
called the short chronology
um
and this time frame was was much too
short to allow for much change or
variation and ultimately it was part of
a colonialist ethic
uh that um
it's much easier to undermine native
american history claims to land
uh if they haven't been there very long
right and some sort of misconceptions
about who native americans are and were
and uh so this led to this short
chronology well this myth was shattered
in 1924 with the founding of what the
finding of one site
and this is the folsom site new mexico
and what you're looking at is a bison
antigua
rib this is an extinct form of bison
with a clear human-made tool projectile
point embedded into those ribs right so
this was discovered in 1924
and it showed unequivocally
that humans and these now extinct
animals that that scientists knew when
extinct at the end of the ice age at
least 10 000 years ago
were in north america at the same time
right so the chronology
basically with one discovery gets pushed
back 6 000 years right this is before
the advent of what we call chronometric
dating techniques things like
radiocarbon dating techniques
uh techniques that can tell us about
what time
this site was occupied
so this was before this so so they're
using we don't know if it uh folks
didn't know if it was ten thousand or
fifteen thousand years ago that this uh
site was formed but in fact that uh this
was at least 10 000 years uh ago because
these animals went extinct at the end of
the ice age
so following this a number of other
sites started to pop up so once that
sort of people scientists have
their eyes are open to the possibility
they start to find more and more sites
and and so uh
a growing list
of human-made tools associated with
pleistocene megaphone and now extinct
ice age animals started to show up and
many of these
um
were associated with mammoth remains so
places like murray spring
and a number of other sites where you
have clear association with human-made
tools and now extinct pleistocene
animals
and
uh at one site uh again in new mexico
near clovis new mexico these really
distinctive
projectile point technologies were often
found associated with mammoths so these
became known as clovis points right and
they're these large
uh bifacially flaked projectile points
with a really distinctive what we call
flute at the base the last thing you do
is sort of make a
thinning flake
on both sides
running uh horizontal to the tip right
and what do you think that's used for
yeah right so to thin it down so you can
more easily lash it to a
a point right or a uh a shaft or a spear
and these then became the uh
the the tools for hunting pleistocene
megaphone
right and so all these sites started to
pop up and uh scientists started to date
these sites uh document these sites
around continental north america
and uh
everything seemed to fit the data where
what we call clovis people migrated
across
a
bering land bridge
because of submerged
because of a lowered sea levels during
the last glacial maximum they moved from
siberia into alaska
waited in alaska until
an ice-free corridor opened and then
migrated down into continental north
america hunting mammoths and mastodons
and extinct uh bison antiguas all these
um
megafauna of north america and this all
seemed to fit the data right clovis were
the first cultures into the new world
they were adapted for hunting these now
extinct megafauna
and they swept from
shore to shore uh with this
deadly hunting
technology so what is clovis clovis is
this paleo indian technology
uh the type site is it a black water
draw near clovis new mexico it's the
oldest of a series of those fluted
points it's flutes right
and it occurs over a relatively
restricted time period from about 13 500
years ago to 12 900 years ago so all
these sites were being found
radiocarbon dating was uh invented in
the 50s
and uh sites were dated and they always
if they had these clovis points dated
into this really tight chronological
time frame right and so this was a
megafauna hunting adaptation for
mammoths extinct bison
uh and the paleo-indian period then ends
when these critters go extinct and new
adaptations follow from
right
and it all seemed to work it all seemed
to fit this was the colonization of the
new world do you remember this from from
grade school from high school perhaps
you remember getting taught this story
you must right yeah all right
so again clovis culture 13 5 to 12 9
before present clovis points spreading
down an ice free corridor across the
bearing land bridge this migration uh
into the new world it all seemed to work
and we talk about clovis points a lot i
want to make clear that clovis points
are very distinctive they tell us that
that site is going to date between 13 5
and 12 9.
but the clovis tool kit was much more
than clovis points these fluted clovis
points so here's sort of a typical
paleo-indian tool kit of knives and
scrapers and
bone points and and other sort of
technologies of the clovis and paleo and
leo
so despite the fact that
uh there were some sort of
archaeologists on the on the margins
saying maybe this is not the way the new
world was colonized maybe there are
problems with this model
most archaeologists accepted it but
problems started to pop up
people started to question this this
idea so one so
this clovis first model of new world
colonization
started to be called into question by a
number of scholars and one
is well what did this ice-free corridor
look like
this ice-free corridor opens up people
quickly migrate down into the new world
what did that that uh ice free corridor
look like was it this fertile paradise
filled with
uh megafauna that people were were
following and hunting along the way
or if you've ever been to alaska
or a recently deglaciated landscape
would it have looked more like this
scraped clean of
resources for megafauna and for human
subsistence
so what did that icefruit corridor look
like when was it viable
right when would it have been viable for
people to migrate down
and then
more data started to come out
such as this this is uh all the fluted
points well
this gets a little complicated but these
are distributions of clovis points and
clovis variants things that may be
clovis points maybe they're later
paleo-indian fluted points but
regardless this is sort of a
distribution
of
what we can call clovis or or closely
related points across north
america what do you see there about that
distribution do you like a little
interaction thing
they're mostly on the east coast they
cluster on the east coast right so some
archaeologists started to question well
if they're coming down an ice street
corridor if clovis is migrating into the
new world into the heartland of north
america shouldn't we see the most clovis
points
in this region and then less
as we go to the coast so does this
distribution cause us
problems well others would argue well
you know there's more people living on
the east coast there's more farmland
people are picking these things up you
know maybe it's just a
visibility issue right rather than
something this is an artifact of the
data rather than some real pattern
uh
john erlinson just told me that that a
new paper came out uh today while i was
driving up and didn't get to see it so
uh but um
the ice free corridor opened right
around 15 000 years ago and a new paper
in nature confirmed that about 14 7 14
6.
so right around that 15 000 years ago
the high street quarter are open
um
this new paper suggests that the ice
free corridor was more this barren
landscape until at least 12
6. so if it's
barren until 12 6 that's not enough time
for clovis to migrate down
into the heartland in the new world and
then plus if we look at the dating of
clovis sites the oldest clovis sites are
in continental north america
clovis sites in the corridor are younger
suggesting clovis may have backwashed up
so they migrated perhaps the other way
right again
it's not the nail in the clovis coffin
but it raises some eyebrows right
oh maybe this
this idea that clovis were these deadly
big game hunters
may be exaggerated as well and there's
lots of debates in the literature over
this uh but essentially we have a couple
handfuls
of clear associations
of clovis points
with megaphone kills
and in fact more and more research has
come out to show that clovis
and clovis people were more generalized
foragers than they were
deadly big game assassins
so again
questioning this model this clovis first
model this very little archaeological
evidence for big game hunting
well in my mind the nail in the coffin
came came with this and this is uh this
site is uh this is the site of monte
verde uh in chile in fact it's at the
southern
nearly the southern tip of chile all the
way down here in south america
uh
tom dillahey has worked at this site
since the 1970s
and uh by the 90s he had published his
magnum opus about this site this massive
two volume set
and there had been other sites
in the new world
that archaeologists had claimed were
older than 13-5
and if you dared suggest that what would
happen is this group of people this very
scary group of people right here
who became known as the clovis mafia
uh these folks would descend not
literally but in the literature and sort
of pick apart
your site and your claims for a free
clovis occupation in the new world
they became known as the clovis mafia
they were the gatekeepers of clovis many
of these folks wrote dissertations and
got tenure and promotion and the
accolades of academia based on this
clovis first model
and they defended that model
as we do as scientists we
critically analyze each other's work
um and so dylan did something really
smart he worked at this site
he dated the site to 14
500 years ago
a thousand years before clovis all the
way down at the southern tip of chile
before the ice free corridor was viable
and perhaps maybe even open
and he had all this great technology
these are tent stakes with hides still
attached to him uh this isn't a site
that's on the coast but it's near the
coast but he published this magnum opus
about it and then he invited the mafia
down
right he got a he got money to fly the
mafia down he had them
the excavations there there are all
these things with it but the excavations
were done they were covered up but he
showed them all the artifacts he showed
them uh the street here they are looking
at the stratigraphy right
and he showed him laid out the case for
them and to a person
they agreed
that monte verde is real it dates to 14
5
clovis is dead well clovis is not dead
it's still real but the clovis first
model of new world colonization is now
on its ear right so decades of work to
explain when and how people first
arrived in the new world has been
thrown away in a day i guess not quite
that dramatic um
so this is mid 90s right john
mid 90s probably i don't know to the
year but but mid 90s probably i think is
yeah something like that yeah
and so uh
we've now had
15 20 years
of
the clovis first model
uh
disputed uh and
no agreement how and when people first
arrived i should add that while the the
the clovis mafia here all agreed it was
real once they got home
at least one dissenting voice started to
to rear up so
uh these things have it's sort of a soap
opera in archaeology to it
a bit
um
so there you know there's lots i could
tell you about monte verde but it's this
incredible excavation house foundations
a medicine man hut all this perishable
material because it was uh in these
special uh preservation conditions or
still like cuds that people were chewing
and spit on the ground i mean it's just
like incredible and also preserved
seaweed and kelp eight different types
so while this site was not on the coast
and in fact when it was occupied it was
even farther away from the coast than it
is today and get to that second
um there's this mix of sort of
terrestrial foraging
and hunting
and
uh foraging on the coast
so this mix of sort of adaptations and
of course no clovis points no fluted
technology
again a thousand years before clovis
so this sort of open pandora's box right
and there are i could tell you about a
lot of other ideas
but since the person who really came up
with the leading idea sitting in the
front row today
the kelp uh the kelp highway hypothesis
was proposed by john erlinson and and
other eco and
a couple ecologists and what they
noticed was and what what they argued
was well the ice free corridor is not
open the most likely and viable route
into the new world was probably along
the pacific coast
and this has to do with a lot of genetic
information a lot of archaeology
but also a lot of ecological information
that the same species of health
the same uh uh types of uh
resources like shellfish and sea mammals
were available from the old world
circumnavigating the north pacific it's
a little break in that kelp uh
replaced by mangrove really productive
mangrove environments then it picks
right back up again
to south america and so john gave it
this snappy name which which really
helps right this kelp highway that
really helped people sort of think about
well if you
imagine trying to walk
from alaska
down to south america
as a hunter-gatherer right it's a tough
road to
to to go down
mountains deserts you'll have to cross
different resources patches that you'll
have to learn to adapt to that's a
really difficult migration where not
that this wouldn't have been difficult
but at least it's the same sort of
adaptations all around the north pacific
that may have facilitated human
migration into the new world
of course the problem with this and john
will be the first to admit
there's absolutely
no hard archaeological evidence to
support this
right in that if
for the hard archaeological evidence we
say
where are the sites
on the coast
that predate clovis
right and if we look around the coast in
the new world there are no sites
that predate clovis that are on the
coast or on islands off the coast
right so where is the archaeological
support for this
well i tell my students often that most
questions can be answered with squiggly
lines all right so and i tell you the
same thing and this is a
climatic record
of uh
temperature
through the last 400 000 years of course
this includes the ice age epic of the
pleistocene
right and if we look at these squiggly
lines what you see is
through periods
we've had this massive fluctuation in
global temperatures through time through
cold and warm periods right
and uh we are here
in a
uh interglacial period a period of of of
warming temperatures
uh and uh
this migration into the new world
if it was pre-clovis
happened during this interval at some
point
during a really cold period
when uh sea
levels would have been much lower
right because what happens during
glacial periods is
ice builds up at polar caps and high
altitude regions and that ice is formed
by sucking out the water from the oceans
and depositing it as snow as ice in
these polar caps and high altitude
regions so sea levels then lower
so perhaps the evidence
the archaeological support for a
pre-clovis migration a kelp highway
migration is submerged by rising
post-glacial sea levels also you all
live on the coast or near the coast here
you know about these coastal dynamics
coastal erosion coastal landscape change
that these sites on the coast
uh
are subject to all sorts of coastal
erosion and so many of these sites might
not only be submerged by rising sea
levels but subject to this dynamic
nature of coastal environments here's a
picture of those maximum ice sheets to
show you
what we're talking about in terms of how
much water is sucked out of the oceans
right and these sea levels forward now
to give you an idea of how
us how dramatically
sea level has been lowered or was
lowered during the pleistocene epic
is here's san francisco is a nice map of
san francisco here are the fairlawn
islands
up to
about 12 000 years ago
well after clovis you could walk from
downtown san francisco to the fairlawn
islands
right
so the really dynamic environment so on
average well uh
since the last glacial maximum 18 000
years ago or so we're talking about 120
meters
of
sea level change
right so this is a really dynamic
environment and so the evidence
might in fact be underwater
perfect we don't have to look right
it's under water just trust us it's
there no we don't do that um
so
and and in fact the modern geography of
coastal environments sea level rise
didn't start to stabilize it continues
to rise and we can get into the politics
of that it's not the time nor the place
for it but um sea level stabilized right
around 7 000 years ago
right and there were periods where sea
levels would rise quickly
and then
more slowly and then quickly and slowly
so this is not sort of a you know
uh
a constant rate of sea level rise over
the last 18 20 000 years this is a
dynamic sort of uh
uh state here ecological state
all right so um the good news is
that all is not lost right there are
examples not many but there are examples
of uh archaeologists finding and working
on sites that are submerged sites
there are very few examples of
archaeologists working on submerged
sites that predate clovis in north
america one that has come out recently
and
you know uh is is really exciting this
is a site in florida
uh in the middle of a river that dates
to 14 500 years old it is pre-clovis all
these really cool stone tools uh these
excavations that are occurring with
scuba gear underwater
uh mastodon bones butchered by humans
really exceptional stuff
very different than finding a site
perhaps under a coastal
environment submerged on the coast but
still can show us
that uh the possibility for finding
sites that are now submerged and
pre-clovisites in particular exists
so
one of the things that we're doing here
this this project now i get to the
project so so that's sort of the
background and one of the really
interesting research questions that
that we're pursuing
but the reason to pursue it on the
channel islands is this
uh work by particularly john and a
number of other folks have found and
dated and studied
the
highest density of early sites found
anywhere in the new world coast
so the channel islands uh the northern
channel islands alone
uh contain
83
we're at 83 right now sites that date
older than 8 000 years
right look at that 8 000 or 83 sites
that date older than 8 000 years now to
put that in some perspective
this is what sea levels look like 10 500
years ago
so many of these sites
when they were occupied are better
understood as inland sites they're not
coastal sites they weren't on the coast
right in many cases they were two three
five kilometers
from the coastline at the time they were
occupied
and so
there's been a lot of work on the
channel islands to find these early
sites find these early terrestrial sites
on the island date them uh study them
better understand them but they are not
coastal sites uh think about all those
potential sites if these are people
adapted to coastal environments
going after shellfish and fish and sea
mammals they would have probably made
camps along the contemporary coastline
and so rising post glacial sea levels
probably
almost certainly
submerged a vast archaeological
landscape that is invisible to us at the
moment
you all know about arlington springs
right one of the more famous sites on
the channel islands this is the oldest
site on the channel islands 13 000 year
old human remains uh first excavated by
fillor in 1959 now dated by john johnson
to uh 13 000 years ago so we know that
that people were on the channel islands
at least 13 000 years ago all the way up
to uh historic contact
and uh we have all these early sites the
modern geography of the islands
all of these early sites despite the
fact that we have lost
75
of the islands
as they looked
18 20 000 years ago 75
of the northern channel islands are now
under water
so what are we missing archaeologically
potentially because of that
so uh the project that we're involved in
now is uh the first sort of systematic
effort to better understand these
submerged landscapes of the pacific
coast
uh we probably know more about the
surface of the moon
i hope no astronauts are in here maybe
uh we probably know more about the
surface of the moon than we know about
uh the sea floor of the pacific ocean
we've done very little to to
scientifically map
and understand the submerged landscapes
of the pacific coast
and so we have this ongoing project that
we started just this summer to start to
get at well
are there archaeological sites on these
now submerged paleo landforms and so
what we do and what
we have a couple different
uh facets of this project and one is
just to continue to do what we've been
doing
uh surveys
uh and work on
the terrestrial environment on the
channel islands to look for early sites
so there's
certain distinctive technologies these
are channel island barb points these are
crescents that tell us they were very
old sites so just like clovis points
tell you that these sites are between 13
5 and 12 9. clovis is still real it was
a real archaeological horizon
it just wasn't the first
in the new world and so uh just like
that just like we use clovis points to
identify and date clovis sites
we can date
archaeological sites on the channel
islands based on their technologies in
many cases
we also
are involved in a systematic radiocarbon
dating of shellmans across the island to
try to find these early sites
and why would we do that well one reason
is if we're going to understand if we're
going to look for a needle in the
haystack and look underwater for sites
let's use the terrestrial archaeology as
a road map to what may be underwater if
we can understand these early
adaptations where people located
themselves why they moved into the
interior of the islands perhaps we can
follow those sites
down to the coastline and underwater to
look for
sites that are now submerged early sites
that are now submerged
and uh so
this project is is funded by by bone the
bureau of ocean energy management and
it's it's part of a cooperative
agreement in that this is not a research
project right uh we're certainly asking
research questions like when did the
first people arrive what do
archaeological submerged archaeological
sites uh where are they located what do
they look like uh what were the
adaptations but for boehm
uh this is about management
if
people arrived in the new world let's
just say we don't even know when they
arrived but let's say they arrived 15
000 years ago get my math right that's
eight thousand years
of coastal occupations that are now
submerged by rising sea levels
just like we protect archaeological
sites
that we see
in the terrestrial environment on the
channel islands or on the mainland we
need to protect those archaeological
sites that are now under water so for
boom this is about managing and
protecting those sites that we can't
even see
right so we don't want to understand
just about when did people first arrive
but
where are the archeologists are there
archaeological sites that are underwater
where are they can we predict where
those might be
uh and in doing so can we avoid damaging
those sites into the future so uh
we're conducting those terrestrial
surveys and
here are
these little yellow marks here are uh
clusters of early sights on the channel
islands sort of a cluster analysis and
where it's red there's lots of them
where it's yellow
there's a high density of them and again
this can tell us about a road map
underwater and then we can also by
understanding how people
settle on the landscape
what resources they need where they
would locate themselves we could start
to map
where those people might have settled on
the underwater landscape so for example
we know that people
located themselves near fresh water on
the channel islands reliable fresh water
and the largest drainages
and we can map
those drainages offshore where do they
go offshore
and by doing that we can set up and
we're
building this predictive model
of where are the high probability
landforms that are underwater that may
contain archaeological sites
so what we do is we build this
predictive model
we put in all our you know uh
like any model it depends on
what
what factors you you
weight and how you weight them right uh
is fresh water the most important are
kelp forests the most important uh is
flat land or what is it that that makes
people want to settle in in certain
locations and so we build this model and
we start tweaking it and start to build
this prediction
of where people may have settled these
now submerged
landforms so in
green
that's sort of a low uh probability
yellow is medium probability and red is
high probability and again based on what
we know about the terrestrial
archaeology based on what we can model
about the underwater landscape based on
all the data that we have of all the
work that's been done
thus far to map the um
the submerged landscapes of the channel
islands and so we build this model
uh and what we've done is is in
early june we started our first work
to
to test this predictive model
or
get more high-resolution
data
of these submerged landscapes so we
built in
we
identified four places based on this
model where people might have settled
as they were migrating
down
the kelp highway
and reached the channel islands
and so here are those four locations
that we've been looking at and just to
give you an example of of this work this
modeling work that we've done this is a
spot the spot in between santa rosa and
santa cruz at one time it had this
massive bay and probably estuary
in between this area there are a series
of early archaeological sites that ring
eastern santa rosa western santa cruz
massive drainages that would have
drained into what uh john has called
crescent bay because of these
uh
chipstone crescents these early
technologies and this may have been a
hot spot for people to settle if they
were going after
uh these uh coastal resources estuarine
resources that would have been highly
productive fresh water would have been
available and all the sort of uh things
that we think would attract people who
are available in this area santa rosa
another one again a cluster of early
sites uh arlington
man he's a man now right he's gone man
woman man based on some analysis of the
arlington remains uh but he's a man now
and there's this cluster of of sites
here uh near in in arlington and again
the sort of
recipe of
uh resources that might have been
attractive for early migrants subsisting
off of coastal resources uh maritime
resources as they moved into the new
world
all right so how we do this survey um
how we map these underwater landscapes
uh we use uh
high resolution mapping this this
chirp system and i had a a really
nice
video that
but due to some technical issues
it's not quite um it's not gonna work uh
but what it does is sends a pulse down
penetrates
tells us about the
of the underwater landscape
tells us about the topography so what it
looks like sort of the modern underwater
landscape and what it looks like
and then penetrates
and does a sub-bottom profile so looks
at the stratigraphy underneath and it
can produce things like this
look at the surface of the sea floor
and the sediments that are
intact underneath that seat
and we can see what those things look
like all right so why would we do this
so this is that first trip here here's
collecting data here's that chirp system
sub bottom and sonar profiling
uh here's uh the crew going to work on
that uh in early june uh here's this uh
one of the locations that we did this in
again in crescent bay here in between
santa rosa and santa cruz and what did
they come up with
this
oh man that's wildly uninteresting right
until you have someone who knows what
they're looking for which is generally
not me it's a geologist right who knows
what they're looking for and can
interpret this stuff and so what the the
geologist tells us this is actually
really interesting so one of the things
that this this is from that spot in
between this is just sort of one image
of hundreds of images that we have um
and and here are some features right so
this is the seafloor
this is what we call the transgressive
surface and the transgressive service
basically is a surface that forms from
sea level rise right and the scouring
out
based on shoreline rise sea level rise
and that's that surface that forms right
uh above it are all the
more recent marine deposits
right sitting above it
and then this here
uh looks like a paleo channel right
mapping one of those channels that we
predicted would be there
based on
uh onshore
uh
a
river
on shore uh uh modern uh riverine
channels right extending those out into
the into the ocean right and sitting
right on top of those are what our
geologist is calling a high amplitude
reflectors
right
that goes into my brain and and this
could be a lot of things right it could
be
wildly uninteresting but it also could
be a showman
there's a possibility that that's a
that's a shellmen uh sitting at right at
the levee of that paleo channel where we
often find shell middens
on the islands today right near the best
fresh water right at the top where
people locate themselves and so uh it's
gonna take a lot sonar and and the sub
bottom profiling is not going to tell us
if there are archaeological sites there
but it can tell us about the
paleogeography it can uh we can predict
or we can analyze what we see and then
we're going to have to go ground truth
back so i'll get to how we do that let
me show you a couple others so this here
here's a an image from
a line right next to crescent bay or
right on the margins of crescent bay
here's another one again wildly
uninteresting until the geologist tells
you what you're looking at
transgressive surface a sea level rise
there's the transparent marine holocene
sediments that have built up since
uh sea level rose but right here this
sort of fuzzy stuff right here uh that
may be esterine preserved estuarine
sediments
right so even being
being able to sort of model
where estering's esterine sediments may
once have been
finding and ground truthing that would
be a a real
leap forward in better understanding
these submerged paleo environments this
sort of
um
these lines and this sort of squiggly
stuff here this is all strata that have
been dipped and folded from
uh
tectonic activity and such right so we
can sort of start to read these images
and sort of predict what they might be
and then uh the last one here that i'll
show you that that i mean again there
are hundreds of these and we're going
through and analyzing all this data
uh
this is i don't know that i've told you
this this is a multiple this is
basically an artifact of the data that
when that
um
that uh that chirp
uh sends that uh signal down it can get
reflected up multiple times and see how
this kind of follows this surface right
here mirrors it so it's just it's an
artifact of the data it's not real
so but here uh what we see here this may
be
gas
it may be an esterine deposit not quite
sure but
i don't want to take it oh i have it
labeled so you know you know what i
think that is this this sort of area
here this may be a paleo shoreline right
so think about uh the shorelines on the
channel islands uh today what you what
you're seeing often in places are really
well preserved are marine terraces
old marine terraces and then there's a
steep drop off that's that old wave cut
platform so this may be a
preserved paleo shoreline wave cup
platform uh here and and uh this paleo
shoreline that may that we may be seeing
preserve again
we know that people were occupying these
old paleo land forms
based on our terrestrial surveys this
may be an excellent place to look for
potential archaeological remains
our second phase of so we did these you
know that first pass in june was of
these broad surveys to look in huge
areas to see if we can see anything
interesting i've showed you a couple
things that i think are interesting and
what we
did six days ago the the trip just got
finished is then to go to those places
that we think are interesting that that
may
uh
uh have land forms or potential uh
archaeological sites and do some high
resolution mapping so rather than really
broad areas over several kilometers we
went and did postage size
sonarwork chirpwork and what what's
called multi-beam work to get the
topography and and uh
of the sea floor and penetrate down
again
into those uh
those potentially preserved strata 50 to
100 meters down that sub bottom work and
to do really fine scale
high resolution
one
kilometer by one kilometer postage stamp
uh reconstructions or sonar work of uh
the submerged landscape
i can't tell you what we found i i have
no idea we the boat came in six days ago
we've got a lot of data to process so uh
in my defense i told you i wasn't going
to give you any answers today so i'm
sticking to it i'm going to get you no
closer to answering those questions i
posed in the beginning
not the channel islands yeah just an
example of the of the multi-beam stuff
but i don't have any images yet of the
channel
uh
the good news is we hope to get some
answers at some point and so we are
going to do some ground truthing of the
interesting things that that i've shown
you the
hopefully even more interesting things
that are going to come up uh from the
recent work we did and we're going to do
a couple kinds of coring it's called a
box core so a small
uh
a wider
larger uh area core that still quite
small meter by a meter less than a meter
by a meter
and we're going to sample the sea floor
so the uh the core is going to penetrate
obviously it's only about 4
inches in diameter but it's going to
penetrate deeply
and what we're going to see is
do we get esterine deposits are these
things that we thought they were
uh do we potentially get archaeological
sites like shellmans preserved in these
are our predictions of what we think the
submerged landscape looks like uh based
on this chirpwork the sonar work do they
turn out to be
be true so
uh
i wish i had more answers for you uh but
that's where we're at and and hopefully
we'll have some
um
uh some more interesting data in the
coming months in the coming years uh
ultimately what we're going to do with
this
is
the the great thing uh about the channel
islands is we have all this information
about early sights early settlements on
the island we're doing all this high
resolution offshore work and it's going
to be the model for the entire pacific
coast so the what we learn here
is going to tell us about where
archeological sites
may be up and down
the north american pacific coast so it
potentially stands as the model for
helping us understand the wider pacific
and so
supposed to be next summer i think it's
going to probably be two summers from
now we're going to take everything we've
learned from the channel islands and all
this work and we're going to go up to
central oregon
and we're going to uh replicate this and
see if we've learned enough to be able
to predict where these paleo landforms
might be where they might be preserved
and where they might contain
archaeological sites that are preserved
off the oregon coast
so that's all i have for you i'll take
questions i did want to
uh
show you that i mean this is just a
small amount of of the folks that are
working on this project i haven't
included all the hard work that graduate
students have done uh and there are
other partners again we have a huge team
lots of supporters and so thanks to all
of them and thanks to you and i'll take
any questions you might have
thank you todd was a great talk
and we'll definitely have to make space
for you for next year's lecture series
and the lecture series out there for
even more answers so happy to do it i
just like to remind you guys we're open
for questions now but just wait for me
to come to you with the microphone so
that everyone can hear so i'll make my
way around here
hi i had a question was are you working
with or sharing any information with bob
ballard with the nautilus program uh we
have had some interaction with uh
bob and and their crew and they they
were doing some work very recently off
the channel islands i think they're in
san diego area now um and so
part of our work is uh
uh
bob is doing a lot of great work and
they kind of they they do their own
thing and so we're collaborating as we
can but but right now they're probably
separate efforts but we are talking and
trying to coordinate things he's he's
doing a lot very quickly so it can be
hard to uh
nail him down sometimes and get the
collaboration
yeah he was yeah and they did some work
and we're looking forward to figuring
out what they um
what they found uh and what they have to
say but
they're working away and
can tell you this because he's much more
senior than me and so
what john said he said we're hoping
yeah
we volunteers at lead hikes on the
islands we
have mittens on virtually every hike and
you know our information and
even like
professor glasgow i think by the recent
finding he has a midden there that's
9500 years old and
but in these middens we're told that
there are thousands of years old that
you find something at the top and you're
gonna go down and you may end up
going deep deep deep to thousands and
thousands of years is this typical and
this is what you're looking for when you
find these sites that these each and
every one of these sites will be
a variance of
thousands of years and and what you find
there it well
it's a little more complicated than that
i mean certainly some sites are
represent thousands of years of human
occupation and people are going to the
same land forms and so you get
uh
deposits sort of built up one on top of
the other and there's great examples of
that but there are other sites
that are single occupations
that are you know 9 000 years old and
it's a single occupation and either
people didn't go and reoccupy that land
form or
uh those later occupations were scoured
out for some reason they were eroded out
or
you know
one example might be that you know we
have all these sea mammals along the
shorelines of the channel islands and
what they do is they they haul off on uh
on the on the
shore and they can scour outside and so
you know the the the coastal environment
is really dynamic right and so some
sites are well preserved and preserved
thousands of years other sites are
single occupation it sort of runs the
gamut
you can go to one spot on one of my
favorite spots
on on all of the islands is on northwest
san miguel
and in one dune
there's
8 000 years of occupation
recorded
in
middens just going right up at dune and
this is you know this massive 80 foot
high dune sequence really cool
other spots are
i always tease john um
he likes to record these really thin
[Music]
uh what we call bird middens because
there's a few muscle shells some abalone
maybe and a couple
pieces of chipstone uh and they're real
archaeological sites but they're maybe
the representation of
one meal that someone had
and then moved on they're john's
favorite sites because then he can he
can go and record that it takes him
about
three minutes to do all the paperwork
and then he moves on and then he leaves
the hard stuff for me
christina
not sure not sure
i'm i'm wondering if you could share a
little bit about the article that just
came out and the coastal migration yeah
i haven't read it but um from what i'm
told uh that uh it's an analysis and
they used uh what's called essentially
dirt dna call it dirt dna they have
other more scientific names for it but
you can get um
information about the animals and plants
that
were around
based on their dna just being in the
soil so um
and
doing that work coring down i assume
they did cores
yeah they
they found that
those pleistocene animals and the plants
that they subsisted on
didn't show up until about 12
600 years ago and prior to that it was
more this
scoured landscape that would have been
really inhospitable for both
animals and humans
and so
uh it's a really powerful um
uh
knock against this
clovis first migration down an ice free
corridor and it it it presents a cl uh
uh problem for even interpreting clovis
then clovis might be the outgrowth of
people who came down the pacific coast
moved inland and then developed this
clovis technology
right uh and then migrated up right and
certainly other folks were migrating
down
the ice free corridor but this must have
happened based on these findings
later than clovis
later paleo and people move down the ice
recorder
so we'll see uh i'm sure there'll be
responses to that paper and i i think
it's particularly interesting because
david meltzer the lead author on that
paper
was one of the authors on the paper he
was part of the clovis mafia
right so he he would be invested in
clovis first he's
based on all the data he's you know
the science the great scientists that he
is he's like this doesn't work anymore
and so i was wrong and we need to move
on and i i
i feel like that's good science in
action if you're still defending your
dissertation uh when you're about to
retire probably something's wrong
i you know it it's easy for me to see
how how clovis points
were used for hunting uh kind of like
arrowheads
but how are the crescents used yeah
that's a great question and uh we get
this a lot there there was actually
there's been a num uh a bunch of
different work uh experimental work to
to answer that question so folks have
taken
um
crescents and you know they come in a
lot of different forms and
people have argued over what they were
used for and how they were used and i
still get lots of people when i show
those things telling me that oh you know
that looks like what my uh what i use to
cut tomatoes right sliced or whatever
right um
and there's been a lot of experimental
work there's also ethnographic analogy
from
alaska to suggest that they were
transverse projectile points so
basically
see if i can get to it
i was going to put a half down one of
these
probably should be pointing up here
so uh the shaft would have been right
here
and here's the
sharpened edge and the point
uh and they were probably used as part
of an atlatl
and skipped off the water into flocks of
birds so there were bird hunting points
in fact john and and another one of our
colleagues corbin rick at the
smithsonian have done a lot of great
work at a site
a couple sites
on um santa rosa island near arlington
springs that have lots of these
crescents lots of these too but lots of
crescents and funnel remains the stuff
that these people were eating and
hunting
and they have a lot of bird bow
uh and so it seems to fit right it seems
to fit uh the new data that's coming out
these are probably bird hunting
technologies so
uh one of the reasons maybe to look at
this
paleo estuary this crescent bay area and
these esterine deposits where if these
people were hunting birds they weren't
doing it up here
12 500 years ago this would have been 2
to five kilometers inland they were
making their technologies up here
probably because uh
uh the chipstone resources
uh were
available on cobbles up here or they're
com coming up on these high terraces as
overlooked locations to see
you know the resources that they were
going to hunt and then going down into
the estuary using these crescents is
bird hunting things and they were
probably not to kill the verb but just
to break a leg or a wing
and then you
skip it off into a flock of them break a
wound them and then you can go gather
them up
so uh crescents date to uh any on the
channel islands they date to anywhere
between we have them from 12 5 or so 12
7 all the way up to about 8 000 years
ago and we also see crescents on the
mainland and it's very similar
they're found near
lakes and estuarine systems right so on
the margins of these things and again
uh probably used to hunt birds
yeah
yeah on the sea to shore sort of all the
talks yes part of our long series of
archived lectures that you can watch at
any time so
we have time for one more question here
so with regard to the the corridor down
the down the pacific coast do you have
any idea of what kind of width we're
talking about and secondly
the people that got out to the island on
what on islands and i'm i saw cedros
island was on there also what kind of
watercraft did they they used to to get
out there so i'll answer the second part
first and the second part is we don't
know um we don't know i mean that's a
great question i get that all the time
too what i mean it's an obvious question
right well what kind of boats were they
in and
we have no idea we have no idea i think
we can make some educated guesses and i
think
probably the one that most of us would
agree on were some sort of skin boats
uh sort of akin to umiacs
alaska
but no one's found a skin boat uh in the
archaeological record i mean it just
doesn't preserve
uh and there's been a lot of arguments
in the literature about
when
certain types of boats and how certain
types of boats were used on the channel
islands truly read boats how long were
they used when the tamale that sewn
plank canoe come in was it early was it
late
uh and there's lots of debates about
that but
from my perspective it doesn't seem that
the the plank canoe right the tamale of
the channel islands uh was a technology
that was available to these earliest
migrants uh it wasn't invented yet and a
thule reed boat
would have not
made a
trans-pacific
uh trip and so it must have been
something different
and then sort of what you used on the
channel islands then
changed through time because we don't
have any ethnographic records of the
shoemash using skin boats on the
champions so
it's an open question in terms of
what did the
corridor looked like how wide it was
um
well we
what we believe is they would be
following fairly closely kelp forests
and near shore environment so they're
probably migrating following these kelp
forests
and there's been a lot of great studies
done by
ecologists and other folks that have
suggested that uh
10 000 12 15 000 years kelp forest would
have been even more productive and more
widely distributed
uh than they are today and so they're
they were probably following these kelp
forests it's a lot safer to go and
travel in these kelp forests a lot less
wave action especially if you're in a
skinned boat and you don't want to be in
these really cold waters right and get
flipped um but you're also following
resources that the resources that they
were subsisting off of for kelp forest
resources and near shore
well let's give one more round of
applause to dr todd brady thank you
again for coming
you