Differences in Human Population Density between the California Islands and the Coastal Mainland

Abstract

If the California Islands were marginal environments for the indigenous people who occupied them, human population densities on the islands should be significantly lower than the adjacent mainland coast. Reconstructing population densities at particular times in the past is fraught with methodological difficulties, but data from site sizes and densities, radiocarbon date distributions, and mission records give no indication that island population densities were significantly lower than along the coastal mainland. Population density measures provide little evidence of environmental marginality on the Northern Channel Islands. Human population densities on islands further south may have been lower than the northern islands, but do not appear to have been significantly different than the adjacent mainland coast.