Evaluating Cross-Channel Exchange in the Santa Barbara Region: Experimental Data on Acorn Processing and Transport

Abstract

mash of southern California were one of the most complex hunter-gatherer groups in North America (Arnold 2001; Gamble 2008). A key component of Chumash complexity concerns the intensive exchange that occurred across the Santa Barbara Channel (Figure 1). Over the course of several centuries starting around 900 C.E., Chumash bead specialists on Santa Cruz Island produced millions of shell beads that were exported to the mainland coast and traded throughout southern California and the Great Basin (Bennyhoff and Hughes 1987; Eerkens et al. 2005). In exchange for such beads, it has often been suggested that the Island Chumash received terrestrial plant foods, which were rare on the islands but abundant on the mainland coast (Arnold 1992, 2001; Gamble 2008; Kennett 2005). Of the many plant foods that might have been traded to the islands, acorns are among the most frequently mentioned in ethnohistoric literature (King 1976; Timbrook 2007) and represent one of the most easily storable and transportable food items available to the Chumash. As such, acorns can serve as a good proxy for the evaluation of food transport from the mainland to the islands. Numerous recent scholarly works have mentioned acorns as representing an important mainland contribution to Chumash exchange systems (Arnold 2001, 2012; Gamble 2008; Kennett 2005). Despite the prominence of acorns in the literature, archaeological evidence for their exchange across the Santa Barbara Channel is extremely thin. This problem is most apparent when we look at evidence from macrobotanical studies conducted on Santa Cruz Island (Martin 2010; Martin and Popper 2001), which have found only a handful of acorns after decades of archaeological work. Additionally, bedrock mortars are extremely rare on the islands (Hudson and Blackburn 1983:102), a pattern that we would not expect to see if islanders were importing large amounts of acorns and grinding them into meal. EVALUATING CROSS-CHANNEL EXCHANGE IN THE SANTA BARBARA REGION: EXPERIMENTAL DATA ON ACORN PROCESSING AND TRANSPORT