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I work primarily right now on the channel islands, which are ta series of eight
offshore items located between Point Conception and San Diego, so primarily
off the coast of the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara area.
It's a beautiful Mediteranean climate. I've worked primarily on the Northern
Channel Islands, which are part of Channel Islands National Park.
Because they're a National Park, there are no cities or towns or, or really very
much development of any kind on the islands.
Primarily what I'm focused on is understanding how people in the past
interacted with and had an influence on the environments in which they were
living. So one of the questions might be how did
people. Have an impact in the past on the near
shore [UNKNOWN] on which they were gathering shellfish, or how did they have
an impact on the seals and sea lions that lived and bred on the beaches nearby.
One of the main projects I'm working on is dealing with human fishing strategies
and the nature of local kelp forest ecosystems, and kelp forests are these...
Now they're kind of like a big forest under the sea full of marine life.
And they're regulated by a variety of different organisms.
They may be hosting hundreds of different fishes, and shellfish, and marine
mammals, but it's just a couple different organisms that influence, and really
control, the structure of that. In these cases it's sea otters and sea
urchins and abalones. And then in California, a type of fish
called a sheephead. And then also a lobster.
Sea urchins and abalones, they tend to eat kelp.
Whereas the other organisms, the fish and the, the sea otters, they eat urchins and
abalones. And in a healthy kelp forest, what will
happen is, is urchins and abalones will be kept, their populations will be kept
down by these other predators. And so they'll be relegated to cracks and
rocks, and eating primarily drift kelp and the kelp can continue to grow.
What happens when these things get out of check, though, say if a sea otter gets
over hunted, what happens in those cases is.
Sea urchins and sea otters can just explode in, or sea urchins and abalones
rather, can just explode in abundance. And then all of a sudden, you get what
are called urchin barrens. They're like deserts under the sea.
So these old forests of kelp just get depleted, and it's a, a much more
diminished environment. Now we're exploring this issue by looking
at the different types of organisms, because we get these things in
archaeological sites. We get sea urchins.
We get sea otters and we want to understand, well did, could people have
over-hunted sea otters in the past perhaps and, and caused a, an ancient
urchin barren. Now we've explored that over the last 5
or 6 years. But one thing we've never really
adequately dealt with is the role of the fish that I mentioned.
The sheephead, they're pretty big, it can be this large.
They are very stark looking, they have two black stripes and a red stripe down
the middle. they actually change sex in the middle of
their lives, they go from females to males.
and that have these gigantic teeth on them.
This is a sheep head premaxila from a pretty, a large fish and you can see some
of the teeth coming off it. This would be in the upper part of the,
the jaw structure. You can flip it over and see that they've
got all these small little teeth on the side in here, to crunch up the different
types of shellfish, especially the sea urchins that they eat.
But these fish are really important, because they Help maintain this kelp
forest, and so we've been trying to investigate did ancient people or Native
Americans who lived on these islands, did they heavily fish for sheephead?
And if they did does that change through time, and did they maybe reduce the
numbers of fish head, of sheephead in some, some areas, and if so, did that
maybe cause some localized urchin barons or help cause it if they are also
reducing otters in those places. in my own work, I think it's really
important to try and increase the relevance of archaeology.
Something that I think a lot of people unfortunately would view as an esoteric
discipline. You know, archeology is something where
we go out and just collect things and we get pots and pretty artifacts and we put
them in museums and we tell a story. And at the end of the day everyone
leaves, like wow that was neat, you know the Mio interesting and it kind of
fizzles out of your mind. Well we have much more to say about that,
you know this is a field after all that could, you know, tell us about the
origins of Agriculture and domestication to the rise of states and complex social
hierarch to the origins of writing. Now all these things that make us human.