Cultural Evolution and Paleogeography on the Santa Barbara Coast: A 9600-Year 14 C Record from Southern California

Abstract

Since 1984, a large multi-disciplinary archaeological team, under the direction of the author, has collected artifactual, ecofactual, and radiocarbon samples from a series of Native American sites spanning the past 9600 14 C years. Occupied historically by the Chumash Indians, the Santa Barbara coast (Fig 1) has seen dramatic cultural and environmental change during the course of the Holocene. One of the goals of the research is to reconstruct patterns in the evolution of the local coastline, while examining the effects of environmental change on human adaptation along the Santa Barbara coast.