Fishing, Subsistence Change, and Foraging Strategies on Western Santa Rosa Island, California

Abstract

Shifting from shellfish collecting to fishing as a primary coastal foraging strategy can allow hunter-gatherers to obtain more food and settle in larger populations. On California's northern Channel Islands (NCI), after the development of the single-piece shell fishhook around 2500 cal BP, diet expanded from primarily shellfish to include nearshore fishes in greater numbers. During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (1150–600 cal BP), settlement on the islands condensed to a small number of large coastal villages with high population densities supported largely by nearshore fish species including rockfishes, surfperches, and señoritas. Faunal data from five sites on western Santa Rosa Island (CA-SRI-15, -31, -97, -313, and -333) demonstrate an increase in nearshore fishing through time. We argue that demographic changes that occurred on the northern Channel Islands were accompanied by changes in subsistence strategies that were related in part to risk of failure when attempting to acquire different resources. As population density increased, the low-risk strategy of shellfish harvesting declined in relative importance as a higher-risk strategy of nearshore fishing increased. While multiple simultaneous subsistence strategies are frequently noted among individual hunter-gatherer communities in the ethnographic record, this study provides a framework to observe similar patterns in the archaeological record.