Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Settlement Ecology on California's Channel Islands

Under the guidance of Dr. Douglas Kennett, Christopher Jazwa will develop and test a model of past human settlement patterns on California's Northern Channel Islands. The Northern Channel Islands are a series of four islands and associated islets off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, that were occupied continuously from 13,000 years ago until the last inhabitants were brought to mainland missions by the Spanish in the 1820s. This project will use environmental variables to predict the optimal locations for permanent settlement sites on the islands. Through a program of surveying for new archaeological sites, targeted excavation of sites in high-, middle-, and low-ranked locations, extensive radiocarbon dating to establish a chronology for occupation, and oxygen isotopic analyses of California mussel shells to reconstruct season of occupation for sites, this project will test how people responded to population increase and changing environmental conditions through settlement expansion.

This has direct applications for population structure in the current United States. By understanding how people in the past adapted to overcrowding and environmental degradation by modifying their environment, developing new technologies, or seeking new locations to settle, one can better understand the options available today and learn from decisions that were made in the past. California's Northern Channel Islands provide an effective laboratory to study this because they are spatially bounded, have a limited and relatively well-understood set of resources, are well-preserved as part of Channel Islands National Park, have a long history of archaeological research, and have a long time depth of human history.

For this project, Kennett and Jazwa will model the settlement decisions in response to changing environmental and demographic conditions using the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD), a model borrowed and adapted from population ecology. The IFD is an effective model for understanding human settlement because it can incorporate different groups of environmental variables and it is testable with archaeological data. This project will be a valuable contribution to the archaeological literature because it will be the first to explicitly test the model using data collected in the field. Kennett and Jazwa will use a variety of data sets to do this. Survey for sites will establish a better understanding of the distribution of populations across the landscape and excavation will be used to understand changes over time. These changes will be anchored chronologically with extensive radiocarbon dating. Seasonality studies will be used to determine whether settlements were occupied year-round or were part of larger settlement systems. The results of this study will be published in peer-reviewed journals and shared at professional conferences in the form of presented papers and posters. This project will also be an important part of Jazwa's professional development and will result in his Ph.D. dissertation. Laboratory processing of excavated materials will be done with the assistance of undergraduate students at Pennsylvania State University, aiding in their education and development as archaeologists. Finally, survey and data collection from this project will be done in part to satisfy the goals of Channel Islands National Park to inventory our nation's valuable cultural resources.