Altamira Press California Maritime Archaeology: A San Clemente Island Perspective

Product Description San Clemente Island is a microcosm of California coastal archaeology from prehistoric through historic times-not only because of the extensiveness of its archaeological remains but because those remains have been so well preserved. In California Maritime Archaeology, the authors use the island as a platform to explore evidence of early seafaring, colonization, paleoenvironmental change, and cultural interaction along the California coast. They make a strong case that San Clemente island should be seen as a kind of "California archaeological Galapagos," offering an extraordinary variety of ancient life as well as surprising information about prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the northern Pacific. The authors' two decades of research have resulted in this rich cultural history that defies widespread assumptions about California's ancient maritime history. Review California Maritime Archaeology is a landmark publication, one of the few occasions when a team of archaeologists has documented in a single volume an entire island history from its first ancient settlement to the historical era. This important book is, hopefully, but the beginnings of generations of research on San Clemente that see the small populations that once lived far offshore as part of a much wider world. Like all cutting edge research, these pages pose more questions than they answer, notably about the complexity and mainland ties of San Clemente communities, and so they should. Above all, they highlight the importance of achieving a far closer understanding of ancient seafaring along the California coast, which apparently took canoes of some kind much farther offshore much earlier than we suspected.--Brian Fagan, from the forewordThis important study offers new perspectives on maritime hunter-gatherers based on more than two decades of cutting-edge archaeological research on San Clemente Island in southern California. Synthesizing more than 9,000 years of history, Raab, Cassidy, Yatsko, and Howard address some of the big issues in hunter-gatherer studies today: early seafaring, the timing of residential stability, long-term human-environmental interactions, sociopolitical complexity, and colonial encounters. This provocative book will energize healthy debate about maritime societies in California for years to come.--Kent Lightfoot, University of California, BerkeleyThis is a brilliant synthesis, summarizing years of intensive research, that places California's San Clemente Island at the heart of current debates about the peopling of the Americas, the antiquity and nature of maritime adaptations, the rise of cultural complexity, the effects of European contact on Native Americans, and much more.--Jon M. Erlandson, University of Oregon About the Author L. Mark Raab is emeritus professor of anthropology, California State University, Northridge. He has written scores of scholarly articles and several books, including editing California Prehistory, Archaeology, and the Myth of Paradise with Terry L. Jones, pub. University of Utah Press 2004. Jim Cassidy is an environmental specialist with the United States Marine Corps. Andrew Yatsko is a staff archaeologist with the U.S. Navy. William Howard is a research associate at the Center for Public Archaeology at California State University, Northridge.