Abstract
During the Pleistocene, California’s Northern Channel Islands were parts of the paleo-island of Santarosae, colonized by maritime peoples at least 13,000 years ago. Since the last glacial maximum, rising seas have flooded over 700 km2 of former coastlines and coastal lowlands of Santarosae where additional and earlier evidence for human occupation may exist. Recent research has shown that an archaeological search of these drowned landscapes may provide broader insights into the nature of Santarosae’s earliest human settlement, unobtainable through terrestrial archaeology. Using GIS, elements of the terrestrial landscape (topography, geology, caves, and springs) of Santarosae were overlain with reconstructed shorelines and the location and characteristics of known terrestrial archaeological sites to predict where sites may exist in the submerged maritime landscape. The key goals of the project were to evaluate the efficacy of predictive models in the search for early coastal sites, to determine whether the location and environmental variables of sites above the sea hold predictive value for finding submerged sites offshore, and to search for submerged cultural evidence in the high priority areas of the submerged landscape determined by the models.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Geoff Bailey, Robert Ballard, Todd Braje, Bob DeLong, Nic Flemming, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Amy Gusick, Douglas Kennett, Don Morris, Nicholas Pinter, Torben Rick, and Ian Williams for freely sharing information about the archaeology, ecology, and paleogeography of San Miguel Island or the challenges of predictive modeling and underwater survey in submerged coastal landscapes. We thank Pat Smith and Travis Shinabarger for volunteer diving work. We are also indebted to Ben Ford who encouraged us to present a progress report at the 2008 Society for Historical Archaeology meetings and helped with the editing and production of this paper. For ship time and other logistical support related to the 2009 underwater survey work, we are grateful to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary, and Channel Islands National Park, including Robert Schwemmer, Matthew Davis, and the crew of the R/V Shearwater.
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Watts, J., Fulfrost, B., Erlandson, J. (2011). Searching for Santarosae: Surveying Submerged Landscapes for Evidence of Paleocoastal Habitation Off California’s Northern Channel Islands. In: Ford, B. (eds) The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes. When the Land Meets the Sea, vol 2. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8210-0_1
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