Journal ArticleDOI
Complex Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers of Prehistoric California: Chiefs, Specialists, and Maritime Adaptations of the Channel Islands
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The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region were among the most economically and politically complex hunter-gatherer cultures of the New World as discussed by the authors, and rich ethnohistorical documents pertaining to chumash culture were analyzed, providing an excellent foundation for understanding the simple chiefdom that was in place as explorers and missionaries arrived in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.Abstract:
The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region were among the most economically and politically complex hunter–gatherer cultures of the New World. In recent decades, rich ethnohistorical documents pertaining to Chumash culture were analyzed, thus providing an excellent foundation for understanding the simple chiefdom that was in place as explorers and missionaries arrived in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Current archaeological research on the Channel Islands focuses on the emergence of ranked society in Chumash prehistory, with special emphasis on political developments and environmental stresses that contributed to cultural evolution. A wide range of data acquired from the Channel Islands illuminates a new model of the rise of complexity. This model of chiefdom emergence is based on population-resource imbalances, political opportunism, and the manipulation of labor by rising elites. Diverse lines of evidence must be employed to evaluate the timing, causes, and consequences of increasing complexity.read more
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Book ChapterDOI
Pathways to Power
TL;DR: The emergence of complexity in none-hierarchical societies has been studied extensively by a wide range of scholars over the past several decades, and there exist a number of excellent syntheses of the endeavors directed toward understanding the emergence of complex societies as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Practical and prestige technologies: The evolution of material systems
TL;DR: The aggrandizer model of prestige technology as discussed by the authors is a useful means for analyzing both practical and prestige technologies, although the goals and constraints of each are very different, and prestige items emerged only under conditions of sustainable food surplus and included the most important innovations of the last 30,000 years.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tropical Pacific - mid-latitude teleconnections in medieval times
Nicholas E. Graham,Nicholas E. Graham,Malcolm K. Hughes,Caspar M. Ammann,Kim M. Cobb,Martin P. Hoerling,Douglas J. Kennett,James P. Kennett,Bert Rein,Lowell D. Stott,Peter E. Wigand,Peter E. Wigand,Taiyi Xu +12 more
TL;DR: This article examined proxy records from the tropical Pacific Ocean and showed contemporaneous changes indicating cool central and eastern tropical Pacific SSTs during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), with warmer than modern temperatures in the western equatorial Pacific.
Journal ArticleDOI
Competitive and Cooperative Responses to Climatic Instability in Coastal Southern California
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a well-dated, relatively high resolution (25-year intervals) oxygen isotopic marine climate record and new archaeological data from the Northern Channel Islands for the last 3,000 years.
References
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Book
The conditions of agricultural growth
TL;DR: In this paper, Boserup argues that changes and improvements occur from within agricultural communities, and that improvements are governed not simply by external interference, but by those communities themselves using extensive analyses of the costs and productivity of the main systems of traditional agriculture.
Journal ArticleDOI
The evolution of human societies : from foraging group to agrarian state
Allen Johnson,Timothy Earle +1 more
TL;DR: The evolution of global society is discussed in this paper, where the authors introduce the family-level group, the local group, and the corporate group and the big man collectivity.
Journal ArticleDOI
El Niño occurrences over the past four and a half centuries
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed the available information on El Nino occurrences, a regional manifestation of the large-scale (El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)) event, based on evidence obtained from the west coast region of northern South America and its adjacent Pacific Ocean waters.