My research focuses on Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene coastal hunter-gatherers within the northern Pacific Rim region. This focus has led me to incorporate various methodological approaches into my research to better understand early coastal cultures and the importance of coastal adaptations in human development. These methods include hunter-gatherer terrestrial archaeology, submerged marine prehistoric archaeology, geoarchaeology, predictive modeling and paleolandscape reconstruction. To pursue these interests, I frequently seek out collaborations with researchers in paleoethobotany, geology, coastal and marine ecology, and oceanography. My theoretical approaches includes behavioral ecology in the study of mobility and subsistence patterns.

To pursue my interests in understanding early coastal hunter-gatherers, I have developed a number of projects that have differing theoretical and methodological focuses.

Santa Cruz Island:
My thesis research evaluated the nature of mobility on Santa Cruz Island, California during the early Holocene (7,500-10,000 BP). Considering arguments that the unique ecological conditions that exist in maritime environments encouraged reduced residential mobility and hastened the development of socially and politically complex hunter-gatherer societies (Binford 1990; Kelly 1995; Maschner 1999), examination of the development of settlement and foraging organization can help clarify our understanding of social and cultural evolution in maritime contexts. Indeed, researchers have focused on the effect that reduced mobility has on adaptations of food storage, trade, territoriality, and social and gender inequality. On the Northern Channel Islands of California, the effects of reduced mobility and the development of complexity have been widely studied with respect to later time periods; however, researchers are just beginning to consider mobility during earlier periods on these islands. While understanding mobility during these earlier periods will not lead directly to determining the causes of social and political complexity, it provides a baseline for understanding the development of adaptations that influence the nature and timing of this complexity and the factors affecting the cultural trajectory of human groups.

Ecology and resource distribution and abundance are major factors in the mobility, subsistence, and settlement decisions that affect human group development and organization. Recognizing this organization within an archaeological context requires knowledge of the available resources, how these resources are distributed temporally and spatially, and how human groups would be expected to arrange themselves across the landscape to maximize foraging goals. Therefore, the specific goals for this project were to identify resource exploitation, land use, seasonality, and intensity of occupation and the relationship these factors have with paleoenvironmental variables at each known early Holocene site on Santa Cruz Island. Methods for accomplishing this goal included excavation of deposits and analysis of assemblages from all five identified early Holocene deposits on Santa Cruz Island. Excavations yielded artifactual, faunal, and floral assemblages that were analyzed to determine inter-site variation as well as site function, habitat and landscape use, and paleoenvironmental variables.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0946603

Baja California Sur:
Because my research interests encompass a broad anthropological topic that I feel can best be understood by comparing regional ecological adaptations, I developed a second research project in Baja California Sur that utilizes my expertise in underwater prehistoric archaeology. By identifying locales on the currently inundated late Pleistocene landscape that may contain evidence of early coastal hunter-gatherers, I attempt to gain new knowledge about the potential distribution of early sites on nearshore portions of the continental shelf. This knowledge can address fundamental questions within anthropology specifically related to the timing and nature of coastal adaptations and possibly contribute to the debate on a Pleistocene coastal migration into the New World. By using ArcGIS to reconstruct late Pleistocene paleoenvironmental conditions and coastal paleolandscapes within the region, I utilized terrestrial archaeological site distribution models to predict distribution of paleoenvironmental features that might have attracted early hunter-gatherers and subsequently retained archaeological evidence of occupation. Most recently, I utilized remote sensing equipment, GIS, and SonarWiz MAP software to explore and map more fully the research area. While this research is on-going, preliminary results from sediment core and bulk samples have provided clues to past paleoenvironmental conditions and to the coastal processes that have occurred over the past 13,000 years in the region.

This research is generously supported by:
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA)
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/10cortez/welcome.html

National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/projects/cortez-waitt-project/
http://live.today.wpf.test.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/projects/cortez-waitt-project/

Northern Pacific Rim:
My future research goals involve a deeper exploration of the mobility and economy of Pacific Rim maritime hunter-gatherer cultures, particularly those cultures that moved through western North America during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. This time period is ideal for understanding the relationship between humans and their environment as environmental stress during this time period led many Pacific Rim cultures to develop behavioral adaptations that influenced their individual trajectories towards the unique and complex cultures of later prehistory. Through my dissertation research, I have been able to identify behaviors unique to groups previously thought to be homogenous within the Northern Channel Islands region; however, a thorough examination of the economy and mobility of these early groups requires excavation and analysis of collections from additional sites. While I plan on continuing a large-scale project on Santa Cruz Island that focuses on identifying and excavating sites related to early migrations and adaptations, I am developing a research project that examines the local ecological adaptations of groups elsewhere along the northern Pacific Rim, including the Pacific Northwest of North America,Japan, and the Russian Far East.

The goal this study is to document the role that ecological adaptation during the early Holocene (7,500-10,000 BP) had in the historical trajectory of northern Pacific Rim coastal hunter-gatherer groups, and to identify the implications these culturally specific adaptations had on the socioeconomic development of these societies. Environmental stress can increase competition for resources and cause organizational changes such as depopulation, group fission or fusion, and territoriality. These changes could have increased group isolation, changed mobility and settlement patterns, and increased risk amongst hunter-gatherer groups, all of which can affect variation in cultural development. Identifying how hunter-gatherer groups adapt their organizational and mobility patterns to ecological stress early in their development can isolate cultural responses to ecological changes, thereby providing a framework for differentiating between these early environmentally-motivated adaptations versus later adaptations possibly motivated by other external factors such as population pressure or circumscription. At the core of this research is identification of a logistically mobile versus a residentially mobile organizational strategy, and how these relate to the development of more complex sociopolitical systems.