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273 problems. While researchers have recognized many of these shortcomings, others have been largely overlooked or the severity of their in- fluence on modern interpretations has been underestimated. Due to the good stratigraphic integrity and preservation of faunal remains, many archaeological models proposed for North Pacific marine mammal hunting have been based, at least partly, on data from California’s Channel Islands and the larger Santa Barbara Channel area (e.g., Hildebrandt and Jones 1992). Within this area many mainland coast sites have been damaged or destroyed by historic development and compromised by bioturbation, but island sites have yielded long stratigraphic sequences with well-preserved sea mammal remains that can be more easily identified to genus or species . Even under these conditions, however, Debates about the nature and intensity of marine mammal hunting by ancient peoples and the degree of anthropogenic forcing on northeastern Pacific pinniped populations have been hotly contested. Several models have been proposed to explain patterns observed in marine mammal faunal assemblages from mainland and island localities along North America’s Pacific Coast, with little agreement on the initial antiquity and chronology of marine mammal exploitation, the focus of prey species, the distribution of rookery locations, and the effects humans had on sea mammal abundance, behavior, and distributions (e.g., Colten and Arnold 1998; Erlandson et al. 1998, 2004; Etnier 2002; Hildebrandt and Jones 1992; Jones and Hildebrandt 1995; Lyman 1995; Rick et al. 2008). Such studies suffer from a number of historic, cultural, natural, and methodological 12 Resilience and Reorganization archaeology and historical ecology of california channel island marine mammals Todd J. Braje, Torben C. Rick, Robert L. DeLong, and Jon M. Erlandson Human Impacts on Seals, Sea Lions, and Sea Otters: Integrating Archaeology and Ecology in the Northeast Pacific, edited by Todd J. Braje and Torben C. Rick. Copyright © by The Regents of the University of California. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 274 resilience a nd reorgan i zat ion tion patterns may have been changed by historic ecological disruptions (e.g., DeMaster et al. 2001; Fritz et al. 1995). While the relationship between overfishing and sea mammal behavior is poorly understood, some species may have undergone dramatic behavioral changes as a result of anthropogenic food shortages. Natural environmental fluctuations (e.g., El Niño) probably have had similar effects on sea mammal behavior and distributions (Trillmich and Ono 1991; DeLong and Melin 2002). Archaeological and paleontological evidence suggest that sea surface temperature (SST) fluctuations have influenced ancient distributions of marine mammals. Cold-water-adapted species such as the sea cow and walrus, for example, have been identified in California paleontological assemblages dating to the Pleistocene, when colder than average waters allowed increased southern limits on their ranges (Clementz 2002; Harington 1984). Changes in kelp forest ecosystems from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene (Kinlan et al. 2005; Steneck et al. 2002) also may have influenced pinniped and sea otter distributions and abundance, but such changes are not well understood. Today California’s Channel Islands shelter more than 200,000 pinnipeds of six different species (DeLong and Melin 2002) and more than a dozen large and small cetacean species also swim through or are seasonally resident in island waters. Under federal and state protection , the behavior, demographics, and ecology of many of these marine mammal populations have been intensively studied for several decades . During those same decades, archaeologists studying island shell middens spanning the past 10,000 years have recovered extensive faunal and technological records relevant to understanding the deep history of human exploitation of sea mammals. However, only rarely are these ecological and archaeological data sets compared to examine the long, intertwined history of humans, pinnipeds, and other marine mammals in the Southern California Bight. In this paper, with a variety of methodological and interpretive limitations in mind, we synthesize incomplete comparative collections and small sample sizes make detailed zooarchaeological analysis difficult (see Monks 2005:171). Recent DNA studies on some archaeological marine mammal bones suggest that a small number have been misidentified by zooarchaeologists, posing further questions about the reliability of data used to generate models of ancient marine mammal exploitation (Moss et al. 2006). Despite these and other problems, zooarchaeological collections remain the primary means of understanding the deep history of human use of marine mammals in the North Pacific and around the world. Perhaps the most difficult obstacles to overcome in interpreting...

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