California’s Channel Islands

Abstract

Abstract California’s Channel Islands have been home to Island Chumash and Tongva and their ancestors for more than 13,000 years, along with a diverse array of plant and animal species that were central to their livelihoods. After the displacement of island populations to the mainland by the mid-eighteenth century, animal grazing and other Euro-American farming and ranching activities promoted environmental degradation, including large-scale landscape changes. Since that time, and throughout the 20th century, the Channel Islands have been the site of extensive archaeological research, with disparate and intersecting themes across the eight-island archipelago including human ecology, colonization, exchange, and hunter-gatherer complexity. This chapter highlights developments in theoretical and methodological approaches, including historical ecology and human behavioral ecology and their applications and intersection. It also considers some of the broad questions that the Channel Islands are poised to address, including the timing and process of early colonization of the Americas and the development of social complexity among hunter–gatherers. These historical and contemporary trajectories of island research have the potential to advance future studies on the Channel Islands and their relevance to understanding human–coastal interactions globally.