Santa Cruz Island Reserve

22 Jun, 03 AM - 24 Jun, 09 AM

Within the Santa Barbara Channel region, current understanding of the use of plant food resources is largely based on assumptions from ethnographic records and a few kinds of artifacts associated with food processing. The proposed study would generate evidence to challenge or confirm these assumptions through the combined analysis of both macrobotanical remains (e.g., charred seeds), and microbotanical remains (both starch grains and phytoliths) extracted from the surface of ground stone artifacts. While certain resources (e.g., nuts and seeds) are likely to preserve as carbonized macrobotanicals, others (e.g., grasses, roots, tubers) can only be recovered through microbotanical analysis. Therefore, this combined approach allows for the recovery of a much wider range of plant taxa used as food resources, and thus for a fuller understanding of the prehistoric diet. The goals of this project are (1) to recover archaeobotanical data from two middle Holocene (6,650 to 3,350 RYBP) sites in Santa Cruz Island?s Central Valley (within UC?s Santa Cruz Island Reserve), and (2) to expand the existing comparative collection of California native plants housed at UCSB, in order to facilitate species identifications for this, and future, regional studies.

Visit #28697 @Santa Cruz Island Reserve

Approved

Under Project # 25373 | Research

Reconstructing Prehistoric Plant Use on Santa Cruz Island

graduate_student - University of California, Santa Barbara

Reservation Members(s)

Kristin Hoppa Jun 22 - 24, 2012 (3 days)
Kristin Hoppa Jun 22 - 24, 2012 (3 days)

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