CONTEXTS OF CULTURAL-CHANGE IN INSULAR CALIFORNIA

Archaeological and ethnohistorical researchers in California are reapi ng the rewards from a wealth of new information about precontact and e arly historical cultural diversity, technologies, and marine and terre strial ecosystems. Our recent investigations into the later prehistory of the island groups of southern California have centered on processe s of sociopolitical evolution, including the emergence of status diffe rentiation, evidence for intensification of craft production, and asso ciated changes in human uses of animal resources as societies became m ore complex. We have linked some specific changes in diet, labor organ ization, and exchange to documented climatic disturbances, suggesting that opportunities created by such disruptions may have accounted in p art for the timing of changes, but were not their cause in any mechani stic or simplistic sense. A recent American Antiquity report overlooks the primary results of this research and isolates the environmental d ata from a broad multidimensional model of cultural change in coastal California. We provide an update on the status of Channel islands arch aeology and identify the fundamental problems with approaches that ext ract and decontextualize environmental processes from cultural process es by assessing limited faunal data sets.