Culture and climate: reconsidering the effect of palaeoclimatic variability among Southern California hunter-gatherer societies

Abstract

The significance of palaeoclimatic change in the emergence of sociopolitical complexity among maritime hunter-gatherers in southern California has been an active subject of debate over the past fifteen years. Interpretations on the timing and nature of palaeoenvironmental change and its relationship to cultural change have shifted as new high-resolution climate records have been reported. I provide evidence for buffering mechanisms that evolved over centuries and propose that past Chumash societies were more equipped to respond to droughts, El Niño events, and other environmental transformations than were agricultural societies. I conclude that a ranked society developed in the Chumash region prior to the Middle/Late Transitional period (ad 1150 and 1300) and that chronological evidence currently lacks sufficient resolution to argue for punctuated change.

Keywords:

• Maritime hunter-gatherers
• drought
• palaeoclimate
• ENSO
• ranked society
• punctuated
• Chumash
• California

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tom Blackburn, Michael Glassow, Paul Goldstein, John Hildebrand, John Johnson, Chester King, Pat Lambert, Michael Moseley, Phil Rundel, Glenn Russell, Phil Walker, and David Yesner for providing references and sharing their knowledge on this topic. I also want to thank Jon Erlandson, Patricia Knobloch, Pat Lambert, Glenn Russell, and an anonymous reviewer who made constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks are also due to Seetha Reddy who invited me to participate in a symposium entitled ‘Stability, Change and Cultural Adaptations along the California Coast’ at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 2003 where I presented an early version of this paper. I especially am indebted to Jeff Parsons and Walt Koenig who provided insight on the intricacies of climate change and references on the subject. I also want to acknowledge Naomi King who helped format the references and Lori Palmer who drafted the map in Figure 1. Finally, I thank Peter Rowley-Conwy and Michael Shott for inviting me to submit a paper to World Archaeology and for overseeing the publication process.

Notes

Lynn Gamble is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at San Diego State University. Her recent publications concern the origin of the plank canoe in the New World, the emergence of ranked society among the Chumash, exchange in southern California, mortuary practices, and site preservation. She is currently conducting a cultural landscape study in northern Baja, Mexico, involving ethnographic interviews and archaeological survey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynn H Gamble

Lynn Gamble is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at San Diego State University. Her recent publications concern the origin of the plank canoe in the New World, the emergence of ranked society among the Chumash, exchange in southern California, mortuary practices, and site preservation. She is currently conducting a cultural landscape study in northern Baja, Mexico, involving ethnographic interviews and archaeological survey.