Faculty, students, and research associates of the California Channel Islands Laboratory share the central goal of adding to our understanding of the more maritime-oriented and complex hunter-gatherers of the world, primarily those of the North American Pacific Coast. Projects have centered on topics such as specialized manufacturing (especially shellworking and lithic industries), how we can recognize the emergence of complex polities such as chiefdoms, exchange systems, households in the Historic period, technological innovations, the roles of fauna in emergent complexity, micromorphology, the paleoenvironment, and cooperative and competitive institutions.

(right) Looking west over the Northern Channel Islands: (front to back) Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. Photographer unknown..

Over the past 20 years, I have been engaged in empirical and theoretical investigations of the sociopolitical evolution of chiefdom-level societies, particularly complex hunter-gatherers in coastal California. For a discussion of my field research project from 1988-1995, click on The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom. Former UCLA graduate students Roger Colten, Scott Pletka, Aimee Preziosi, and Colleen Delaney-Rivera employed data from that project for theses and dissertations.

The temporal focus of my current work is the terminus of the prehistoric era and the first half-century of intensive contact between indigenous peoples and Europeans (ca. AD 1700-1819) on the northern Channel Islands of California. The spatial focus is 30+ households at four Historic-era village sites on Santa Cruz Island. Finally, the theoretical focus is the relationships among social status, participation in craft or occupational specialization, diet, and household organization and size. Thus far, graduate students Anthony Graesch and Anna Noah are employing project data for theses or dissertations.

Island Chumash villagers were maritime peoples, engaged heavily in using the rich faunal resources of the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Barbara Channel. They traded extensively with their mainland Chumash neighbors across the channel, using their renowned plank canoes. They lived in large permanent communities, they had hereditary leaders who were legitimate chiefs, and they specialized in the manufacture of huge numbers of chert microdrills and Olivella shell beads, and lesser numbers of a few other shell bead types. Graesch's thesis (2000) examines the inter-household variability in the production of shell beads and the acquisition of exotic trade materials, and Noah's dissertation focuses on different households' uses of animal resources and the potential to identify specialization and feasting in faunal assemblages. Other analyses will take place over the next few years.

A reconstructed Chumash tomol on Santa Barbara Beach. After Moratto's (1984:118) Figure 4.2. Original photo by Dick Smith.

An expanded treatment of the origins of complex Island Chumash society is now available in the recently published The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom: The Chumash of the Channel Islands.

There are notable limitations to our understanding of shifts in prehistoric human uses of rich fisheries along the southern California coast. This project has had as its primary objective to develop a comprehensive osteological fish collection at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Zooarchaeology Lab, ultimately permitting us to more effectively analyze samples of fish bone from significant archaeological collections in southern California. Such analyses can assess the changing nature of indigenous fishing practices and associated political, economic, and technological changes spanning several periods of environmental change.

Archaeological research conducted by several scholars in southern California suggests that there was "a spectacular rise" in fishing beginning roughly 900 years ago. In the Chumash area, increasing intensity of fishing has been tentatively linked with several other phenomena. These include population pressure and sedentism, key subsistence shifts and/or environmental perturbations, new technological advances, and other important economic and sociopolitical changes including a high degree of political and economic complexity. A more comprehensive, regionally-based study of fish availability and fishing practices than has been attempted in this region thus has the potential to shed considerable light on cultural evolution and to expand our understanding of the last few millennia of prehistory. We expect to significantly augment what is known about the availability of fish under changing oceanic temperature conditions, technologies used in their capture, and the ability of maritime-adapted people to adjust to subsistence challenges.

Contemporary western North American middle-class families and households, a series of unique configurations reflecting late twentieth century economics, politics, demographics, and historical circumstances, can be best understood if also placed in long-term cultural and organizational perspectives. Cross-culturally, and extending deeply into the past, diverse models of family organization have appeared and survived for centuries and millennia. Ways that people construct and use the built environment, remodel that environment, integrate the external "work" (occupations) of the social unit with the daily work of the home, and construct and manipulate material culture ('artifacts'), among other behaviors, vary notably according to models of appropriate family configuration and home size and internal plan. That is, the architecture of the home and the organization of basic social units within it are, ideally, guided organically by one another and differ markedly across cultural contexts and socioeconomic statuses. Similarly, the larger spatial plan of the neighborhood or community and the form of social interactions interleaf in complex ways and vary substantially from culture to culture.

Using data from the western American past as a starting point, this project employs ethnoarchaeological methods to examine several quite different approaches to the organization of domestic space, family life, external and internal work activities, labor allocation, and the like. The era of European exploration in the west (primarily during the 17th to 19th centuries), in particular, produced numerous ethnographic, historical, photographic, and archaeological resources that may be explored to assess and record several of the fundamental "themes" of Native American construction of home and family. These themes, strongly echoed in modern American life, include nuclear families in single-family dwellings (e.g., most of the Chumash groups of southern California), extended families (often including multiple members of three generations), large households with two or more related or unrelated families, or huge multi-family dwellings with servants (e.g., the Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island) and various associated construction types. A valuable synergy can be cultivated between systematic observations of houses and organization of labor from these many models from the past (and our inferences about the effect of form and function on social units) and systematic observations of the functioning social home units in the present and the degree to which family units shape their spaces and spaces shape behaviors.

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