Amy Gusick

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County · Department of Anthropology

Awareness of and interest in the role that coastlines and coastal adaptations played in the development and dispersal of anatomically modern humans have grown over the last few decades. Scattered evidence for marine exploitation between 125,000 and 12,000 cal BP has been identified in Africa (Henshilwood et al. 2001; Singer and Wymer 1982; Walter e...

Previous mobility hypotheses that have been formed for the Early Holocene on the Northern Channel Islands have included minimal data from Santa Cruz Island, the largest and most environmentally diverse landmass within the Northern Channel Island chain. Yet, data from this island are important because the three main Northern Channel Islands vary in...

Subsistence strategies of the hunter-gatherer-fishers who inhabited the Northern Channel Islands have included fishing since at least 9,000 B.P. While there has been a steady increase of fish meat to the diet over this extended time period, there was a pronounced increase identified during the Middle and Late periods (2,600 – 200 B.P.). This increa...

Forty years ago, Knut Fladmark (1979) argued that the Pacific Coast offered a viable alternative to the ice-free corridor model for the initial peopling of the Americas—one of the first to support a “coastal migration theory” that remained marginal for decades. Today, the pre-Clovis occupation at the Monte Verde site is widely accepted, several oth...

Defining a maritime cultural landscape relies on recognizing both the landscape and seascape as integral to maritime societies. While this concept has been part of anthropological studies for decades, data from the submerged portion of the maritime landscape is often overlooked. The maritime archaeological work needed to collect these data has hist...

The northwest coast of Wimaɬ (Santa Rosa Island) has long been a focus of archaeological research, including former Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History archaeologist, geologist, and paleontologist Phil Orr’s work from the 1940s to the 1960s. Orr pioneered the use of radiocarbon dating on the California Channel Islands, built extensive archaeolo...

On global, regional, and local scales, sea level histories and paleoshoreline reconstructions are critical to understanding the deep history of human adaptations in island and coastal settings. The distance of any individual site from the coast strongly influences decisions about the transport of coastal resources and has a direct impact on human s...

California’s Northern Channel Islands contain an incredible record of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation. Since the hunter-gatherer-fishers who created these sites relied heavily on marine resources, a critical aspect of understanding early settlement patterns is calculating distance to paleoshorelines. This has traditionally...

The lowstand extensions of two fluvial systems from the Cascadia subduction margin are investigated using high-resolution seismic reflection data to determine the relative controls on paleodrainage morphology. We document distinct differences between the two systems, located ~40 km apart, attributed to underlying structure and lithology, shelf grad...

We investigate animal food preferences of the Ostiones people, the occupants of the coastal site of Puerto Marqués, one of the few Late Archaic Period sites located along the Pacific coast of Mexico (4600 and 2000 cal BCE). Our data are based upon recovered faunal remains at the site, which consist of vertebrate bones and molluskan shells identifie...

The Channel Islands of California have received much attention from researchers, in part, due to the long occupation history of the islands that spans at least 13,000 years. The Northern Channel Islands have played an important role in our understanding of early coastal adaptations and development of complexity among maritime adapted peoples; howev...

THE NATURAL HISTORY Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) has a vast collection of material representing cultures from around the world. More than 200,000 cultural items and 18,000 archival documents are curated as part of the Archaeology and Ethnology collections, including objects from the numerous indigenous societies that have thrived in Southern...

Since the collapse of the Clovis-first model of the peopling of the Americas some 30 years ago, there has been growing interest in the Pacific Coast as a potential early human dispersal corridor. With postglacial eustatic sea level rise inundating most New World paleoshorelines older than ~7000 years, however, locating terminal Pleistocene sites al...

High-resolution Chirp sub-bottom data were obtained offshore from the Northern Channel Islands (NCI), California, to image submerged paleoshorelines and assess local uplift rates. Although modern bathymetry is often used for modeling paleoshorelines, Chirp data image paleoshorelines buried beneath sediment that obscures their seafloor expression. T...

As applications for offshore renewable energy projects increase, state and federal land managers have become concerned over potential impacts to cultural heritage resources along submerged landscapes. Identification, documentation, and management of historical shipwrecks have been relatively common, but methods for identifying submerged pre-contact...

Islands have long been viewed as marginal habitats compared to mainland regions where terrestrial resources are generally more abundant and diverse. We examine this concept of island marginality by reviewing evidence for Paleocoastal settlement of islands off the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California. If the islands were marginal, we should exp...

Sea-level rise following the last glacial maximum (~20 kya) has resulted in the submergence of paleochannels, tar seeps, and archeological sites on continental shelves. The distribution of these sites is important for archeological research, offshore infrastructure development, and environmental hazard assessment. Modification of controlled source...

While studies on recovery bias are numerous in the literature, the current research focuses on defining best practices in field collection techniques to provide a more accurate representative of site constituents, particularly fish remains. Methods to determine best practices included use of 1/4-inch, 1/8-inch, and 1/16-inch mesh to process excavat...

This paper proposes an innovative research hub as part of the Coastline and People (CoPe) initiative led by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Specific recommendations, anticipated impact and value, and defined reasoning ans supporting evidence are detailed in the paper.

Recent surveys on California’s northern Channel Islands have highlighted the ubiquity of small, low-density lithic scatters across coastal terraces and interior ridgelines. These sites typically lack organic materials or diagnostic artifacts and are therefore rarely the subject of archaeological investigation. Here we quantify raw material and flak...

Using 1929 aerial photos of western Santa Cruz Island, we identified numerous potential shell midden locations, followed by confirmation of site locations via field reconnaissance. Heavy grazing by sheep, cattle, and pigs closely cropped island vegetation in the early twentieth century, exposing shell middens now often covered with thick vegetation...

Methodological advances are reshaping our understanding of island colonization. Refinements in dating methods, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, and search techniques have resulted in discoveries that challenge outdated theories of islands as marginal to human migration, settlement, and subsistence. This is particularly true for research related...

Oceanographic conditions, especially sea surface temperature, exhibit strong influences on intertidal habitat and species performance. The Northern Channel Island of California are located within a complex oceanographic pattern with persistent cooler and warmer waters on north-west and south-east coasts of the islands, respectively. These patterns...

Paleocoastal sites, dated between ∼13,000 and 8000 cal yr BP, are relatively abundant on California's Northern Channel Islands but rare on the largest island of Santa Cruz. Here we describe three lithic sites containing chipped-stone crescents and, in one case, a stemmed Channel Island Barbed point fragment. Elsewhere on the islands, datable sites...

The hypothesized west coast route of the first peopling of the Americas has seen relatively limited empirical investigation, perhaps because of the difficulty and expense of finding underwater sites. We review some ways of thinking about the ancient coastline and the process of marine transgression that may be useful for modeling underwater site lo...

In this chapter we outline what we know about submerged prehistory from the American perspective by revisiting places where researchers have actively searched for sites, places where sites underwater are known, and places that have great potentials for discovery. We describe our own works conducted on the East and West Coasts of North America: the...

Recent research utilizing paleolandscape reconstruction and targeted underwater survey has yielded the discovery of prehistoric cultural material on the submerged landscape off of Espíritu Santo Island, Baja California Sur. Our ability to identify preserved inundated cultural remains suggests that Baja California’s unique geography and environment...