UCSB Anthropology Brown Bag Lecture Series Presents:

Risk, Warfare and the Origins of Settled Village Life on Santa Rosa Island, CA

By Doug Kennett

In this talk, I discuss the origins of settled village life on Santa Rosa Island, California and associated changes in individual risk buffering strategies. The resource base in the Santa Barbara Channel region, although rich, is relatively unpredicatable. At the time of European contact, people in this region were living in relatively large settled villages. Eight Chumash villages were named in mission records for Santa Rosa Island and have been identified archaeologically. Individuals living in these villages minimized the risk of resource shortfall with a mixed strategy of intense fishing, storage, specialization, and exchange. Archaeological evidence suggests that these strategies emerged around AD 500 and became dominant after AD 1300, late in the prehistory of the region. Prior to this, settlement mobility was the dominant individual strategy for buffering resource shortfalls on Santa Rosa Island, persisting throughout much of the Holocene as an "Evolutionary Stable Strategy". I argue that decreased settlement mobility after AD 500 was one response to increased regional violence related to subsistence stress and the introduction of the bow and arrow. Intense fishing, storage, specialization and exchange became the dominant risk buffering strategies after AD 1300 in the context of reduced settlement mobility and territoriality.



Wednesday May 21, 1pm, 1997
HSSB 2001A, The Anthropology Conference Room

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