Working from the Known to the Unknown: Linking the Subaerial Archaeology and the Submerged Landscapes of Santarosae Island, Alta California, USA

Todd J Braje,Amy E Gusick,Alex Nyers,Loren Davis,Jillian M Maloney,Kristina M Gill,Leslie Reeder-Myers,Jon M Erlandson,David Ball

doi:10.5334/oq.66

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Clovis-first model of the peopling of the Americas some 30 years ago, there has been growing interest in the Pacific Coast as a potential early human dispersal corridor. With postglacial eustatic sea level rise inundating most New World paleoshorelines older than ~7000 years, however, locating terminal Pleistocene sites along modern coastlines is challenging. Using the distribution and archaeology of subaerial Paleocoastal archaeological sites on California’s Northern Channel Islands as a guide, we developed a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) predictive model to locate and map submerged high probability landforms, which might contain Paleocoastal sites. Our results illustrate how archaeologists can narrow targets in their search for evidence of the first Americans along submerged Pacific Coast paleoshorelines.

Highlights

Less than three decades ago, most archaeologists believed the first peoples to enter the Americas were Ice Age hunters who walked across the Bering Land Bridge, passed through an Ice-Free Corridor (IFC), and spread rapidly across the New World beginning ~13,500 years ago, hunting mammoths, mastodons, and other Pleistocene megafauna with fluted and fishtail points (e.g., Holliday, 2000; Meltzer, 1995, 2009; Waters and Stafford, 2007)
As described in a 2013 Pacific Outer Continental Shelf (POCS) submerged site predictive model report (ICF International et al, 2013), the potential for site preservation on the submerged continental shelf is based on several factors: rate of sea level rise, tectonics, sedimentation rate and patterns, wave energy, seafloor geology, and the distribution of natural resources targeted by foragers
Guided by this impressive cluster of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites located around the upland margins of Crescent Bay, we concentrated much of our geophysical mapping efforts in the Santa Cruz Channel (F igure 5)

Summary

Introduction

Less than three decades ago, most archaeologists believed the first peoples to enter the Americas were Ice Age hunters who walked across the Bering Land Bridge, passed through an Ice-Free Corridor (IFC), and spread rapidly across the New World beginning ~13,500 years ago, hunting mammoths, mastodons, and other Pleistocene megafauna with fluted and fishtail points (e.g., Holliday, 2000; Meltzer, 1995, 2009; Waters and Stafford, 2007). This Clovis-first model of New World colonization became dogma and, despite some opposition (e.g., Fladmark, 1979; E rlandson, 1994, 2002; Gruhn, 1988), was supported by most of the available archaeologi-.

Methods

Results

Conclusion