Hi I'm Amy Gusick from the University of California at Santa Barbara
I'm Mike Glassow also from the University of California at Santa
Barbara and we have one more lead on our project that's actually not with us
today his name is Lauren Davis and he's from Oregon State University and we
wanted to talk to you guys a little bit today about our project that we're doing
for NOAA, the main goal in our project is to identify evidence of a Pleistocene
Pacific coastal migration into the new world. This is an important topic among
North American archaeologists basically there are two related issues one is when
did the migration of human populations across the Bering Strait and down into
North America occur, could it have been as early as 15,000 years ago
or was it later in time closer to 13,000 years ago
the other issue is how did that expansion into North America occur was
it an expansion through the interior of North America once the glaciers had
receded or was it perhaps a coastal migration by people who already were
adapted to the use of marine resources and had boats or alternatively it could
have been both scenarios working in tandem these are issues that are of
great interest to quite a number of archaeologists working in North America
today. And our goal with this project as I mentioned is to try to find evidence
of a coastal migration into the new world but you know there are a lot of
impediments to being able to identify sites that are date that date to
thirteen fourteen fifteen thousand years ago and one of the major impediments for
this is sea level rise so in the Late Pleistocene and through the early
Holocene there was a sea level worldwide sea level rise that inundated thousands
of miles of coastline so any of the archaeological sites that were located
on those would now be beneath the sea so our- this
project is focusing on looking beneath -looking on the ocean floor to
identify some of these archaeological sites. Not all of these archaeological sites will be
preserved of course, wave action will have destroyed quite a number of them
but there will be certain circumstances in which sites will preserve as sea
level rose and the area we are intending to investigate is one of these areas
where we feel that there would be little damage to the archaeological deposits
sea level rose right and so that brings us to where are we looking the area that
we're looking in is off is in the Gulf of California in the southern Gulf of
California off of a small island called Isla Espiritu Santo we're looking off
of kind of the western margin of this island and one of the reasons are a
number of the reasons why we feel this is a good area to look for evidence of
these preserved archaeological sites is that the terrestrial archaeology in the
area has yielded a number of Late Pleistocene sites that date to about
eleven thousand two hundred years ago but are located in rock shelters on the
island itself another really big boon to the research done in this area is that
the geology of the island itself presents a lot of rock shelters and a
lot of rock outcroppings and these are features that are considered attractive
to these early coastal hunter-gatherers that were interested in finding evidence
of and you know in a submerged environment we can actually look for
these particular features using particular types of sonar equipment and
remote sensing equipment and then what we do is we target these features and we
can actually sample them so in what we're actually doing for our project to
be able to identify this is we're doing a combination of side scan sonar and
sub-bottom profiling what the side scan sonar will allow us to do is look at the
seafloor and look at the the geomorphology of the seafloor any sort
of morphological features that are actually located above but on the actual
seafloor below the sediment so we'll be able to
find things like rock outcrops you know rock shelters steep slopes and we'll be
able to target those for future research we also use a sub bottom profiler and a
sub bottom profiler actually gets below the sea floor surface it penetrates the
the sediment and we'll be able to save to see things like buried river channels
and also buried shell middens and the reason why would we would be looking for
buried shell middens is because these are the types of archeological sites
that are most frequently associated with these early maritime hunter gatherer cultures. Indeed shellfish is
one of the easiest coastal foods to acquire in many locations along the
coast so we already know in fact that there are sites in Baja California that
contain abundant shell that are dating more than ten thousand years ago so it's
it's a reasonable expectation that we would find these kinds of sites in this
location and so after we complete a sonar survey in the area and we'll have
identified these these different targets within the sonar images that we're going
to be processing and once we have our targets selected what we are going to do
then is actually scuba dive on the targets and you know these targets are
going to be in the area anywhere from you know 20 feet all the way up to 300
feet we're only using conventional scuba for this this time around so we're only
going to be able to actually physically get down to 130 feet deep to sample
these targets and what we're going to do when we sample them is take videos of
them we're going to generally survey them to verify what we see on the sonar
images is actually what we think it is when we get down there and we're going
to do a general survey and we're going to do sampling sampling will include
archaeological test pit sampling and it will also include core sampling you know
of course we're hoping to find archaeological material shell middens
evidence of tool fracturing but you know we also can
collect a lot of other types of data and some of these the core samples will be
able to collect a lot of data that pertains to the sedimentation rates in
the area that have happened over the fifteenth over this last 15 thousand
years and we'll also be able to identify different depositional episodes within
the sediment that will kind of clue us in to what the environment used to be
like in the area so if we find terrestrial sediments that indicate it
was a marshland or indicate that there was an estuary there you know that'll
really help us target our our archaeological focus to areas that are
going to be you know the best areas to look that are going to produce the types
of resources that these early hunter-gatherers we're interested in in
collecting and then we can look for evidence of that collection there and
another great thing about being able to do these types of projects is that with
the data that we collect it's not only beneficial to our project but it's also
beneficial to other types of Sciences that would be interested in the area
there hasn't been a lot of research done in this particular area that we're
working in so our data is going to be really beneficial to people that are
interested in geology and any number of marine sciences biology environmental
studies in the area and so that's really great that we can you know try to
collaborate and share our data with these with these other Sciences. Well the
project is of course going to be a challenge to find these sites that might
be dating as early as 13 to 15 thousand years ago but if we are successful there
is a good chance that we will be helping to rewrite a chapter in the history of
the human occupation of North America we might very well be finding some of the
most definitive evidence in fact of occupation dating as much as thirteen to
fifteen thousand years ago which will be a first along the coast the Pacific
coast of California
you