With funding provided by the National Science Foundation, the Red Abalone Midden Project (RAMP) began in June 1997 with nearly three weeks of fieldwork on Santa Cruz Island, the largest of four northern Channel Islands forming the southern margin of the Santa Barbara Channel. Collections from small-scale excavations at five prehistoric sites are currently undergoing analysis in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The project's main objective is to learn more about the nature of a series of sites on the western part of the island occupied at intervals between approximately 6000 and 2800 BC and what these sites might be able to tell us about changes in ecological adaptation during this 3200-year timespan. These site are distinctive in that their midden deposits contain abundant shells of red abalone (Haliotis rufescens),a large marine snail. As head (principal investigator) of this project, I am particularly interested in the ways in which use of marine food resources—shellfish, fish, and sea mammals—may have intensified over time.
My field crew and I completed fieldwork on Santa Cruz Island in September 1997, and currently my lab crews and I are in the midst of processing the collections in an archaeological laboratory at UCSB. The laboratory work is expected to be completed in November 1999.