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An 8,000-year sequence of sh remains from Morro Bay, a shallow, 8.1km.2 coastal estuary in San Luis Obispo County, has been compiled during recent investigations. The sample, obtained from nine sites and 14 components (total excavation volume=275.86 m.3), includes 19,226 sh elements recovered via 1/8-inch dry-screening and 718 elements from 1/16-inch water-screened columns. The archaeological ndings are generally consistent with species inventories from the 1970s, although northern anchovies are under-represented in the prehistoric record. Remains show a consistent focus on the netting of small schooling shes in the calm backwaters of the bay. A signi cant decrease in bat rays is attributed to a shift in seasonality, although overexploitation cannot be ruled out. Remains show only modest changes between 8,000 and 950 cal B.P., but a dramatic spike in NISP/m.3 and sh/deer+rabbits during the Middle- Late Transition suggests an increased focus on marine prey during droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, when Morro Bay apparently served as a refugium. Fishing declined relative to terrestrial resources during the Late Period, when acorns and other plant foods increased in importance.

This issue of the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology marks a transition in editorship from todd Braje to myself. the Journal thrived under todd’s direction, and I thank him for his efforts and look forward to continuing this ne tradition of scholarship and publication. Much of what appears in this issue was initiated by todd, including a special series of papers honoring the contributions of Billy Clewlow. these papers not only do a great job of acknowledging Clewlow’s work, but also provide valuable narratives that help us better appreciate the history of our discipline.

Prehistoric rock art is a most obvious part of the archaeological record, yet some interpretative models increasingly distance this art from its archaeological context This is particularly true for the Coso rock art area, which has emerged as a "type locality" for a shamanic approach to rock art interpretation. The fundamental thesis of the current paper is that the meaning and antiquity of prehistoric rock art are best understood by placing the art within its contemporaneous archaeological context using routine analytical methods. We advocate a return to the archaeological approach of interpreting rock art and argue against the perpetuation of increasingly complex and confounding "explanations " based on untestable hypotheses extrapolated from ethnographic data with questionable linkages to the archaeological record. Reviews of local and regional chronological data, settlement patterns, and subsistence practices indicate that the production of Coso rock art tracked closely with the rise and fall of bighorn sheep hunting in the southwestern Great Basin. During the Newberry period (3,500-1,350 cal B.P.), when darts and atlatls provided the main technology, the hunting of bighorn sheep was a major component of the adaptation. When the bow and arrow were adopted during the Haiwee period (1,350 650 cal B.P.), hunting efficiency increased and ultimately contributed to the depletion of sheep throughout the region. We conclude that the proliferation of bighorn sheep petroglyphs during the Haiwee period reflects a unique local response to a regional problem. Responding to the over exploitation of a key food resource—bighorn sheep—local groups intensified their ritualistic practices, and did so in a way that vividly marked their territory and signaled their distinctiveness from neighboring groups in California and in other parts of the Great Basin.

A rich archaeological record spanning much of the Holocene exists in the Coso Range of southeastern California. An archaeological survey of over 2,564 acres was focused within the pinyon-juniper zone of these uplands at Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake. In total, 184 prehistoric sites were recorded, and are used here to evaluate a series of alternative models regarding the origins of intensive pinyon nut use in the southwestern Great Basin. These findings indicate that fully-ripened nuts were probably used on a regular basis deep into antiquity, but the more intensive(and expensive) harvest of green-cone pinyon nuts largely occurred after 1,350 B.P This conclusion has important implications for interpreting prehistoric land-use patterns in the region, and supports earlier hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for the spread of Numic populations during the later phases of prehistory.

Archaeological survey within the Coso Mountains resulted in the discovery of two wooden bows. The artifacts were cached in a rock crevice, and appear to represent sinew-backed, reflexed bows commonly used by Native peoples throughout much of the Great Basin. Due to rapid declines in the use of bow-and-arrow technology brought about by the introduction of guns during the historic period, ethnographic specimens and accounts of how bows were made and used are quite rare. Moreover, it appears that the Coso bows represent the only complete or near-complete examples ever recovered from an archaeological context in southern California and the western Great Basin.

A model of prehistoric marine mammal overexploitation advanced by Hildebrandt and Jones (1992) for the northeastern Pacific has been challenged by Colten (1995) and Colten and Arnold (1998) who argue that diachronic patterns in faunal remains from California's Channel Islands reflect climatically-induced decline in marine productivity and local socio-cultural developments not overpredation. In this paper, we point out that some Channel Islands faunal trends are consistent with overexploitation, while others reflect methodological variation between studies. Newly available paleoenvironmental data raise questions about previous characterizations of late Holocene marine productivity, while new zooarchaeological findings from Monterey Bay, San Miguel and San Clemente Islands provide strong support for overexploitation in ways not envisioned in the original model. Such findings show that linear optimal foraging constructs may not account for all local variation in faunal assemblages, but still provide powerful explanations for broad patterns over time and can further provide useful insights into prehistoric human ecology.

This paper considers the two competing models of late Holocene settlement and subsistence on the northern San Diego County coast. A large body of regional data derived from single component site contexts at Camp Pendleton and surrounding areas suggest that neither the coastal decline nor the coastal intensification alternative is entirely accurate, and that a more detailed analysis of late Holocene land use is required. This synthesis draws parallels with other parts of the California coast as well as to interior regions of San Diego County. Evidence for intensive use of coastal resources is limited primarily to an interval corresponding to the Middle Period elsewhere in southern California. Late Period economies, on the other hand, appear to have had a terrestrial focus, with short-term seasonal occupations of the coastal zone directed primarily at the harvesting of bean clam (Donax gouldii) and other seasonally abundant resources.

In this volume, Terry Jones (1997) provided a thorough critique of my summary (also in this volume [Hildebrandt 1977a]) of prehistoric hunter- gatherer adaptations in the southern Santa Clara Valley, California (also see Hildebrandt and Mikkelsen 1993). His review identified a variety of issues that warrant additional consideration, particularly those pertaining to settlement chronology, paleoenvironmental change, and Late Holocene subsistence intensification. I appreciate his comments, as my attempts to address them will hopefully improve our understanding of wetland adaptations in central California and beyond.

Data from excavations at five sites in southern Santa Clara Valley provide several interesting insights regarding the relative importance of lacustrine and estuarine resources to prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations. The sites are located 20 to 26 km. inland from the saltwater estuary of Elkhorn Slough, but only between 0.3 and 9.0 km. from San Felipe Lake and its adjacent marshlands. Essentially ignoring the local lacustrine-marshland resource base, early populations (ca. 4,200 to 2,500 B. P.) employed a mobile subsistence-settlement strategy that included transport of estuarine resources (largely bay mussel) to interior residential bases located far from Elkhorn Slough but relatively close to San Felipe Lake. This general adaptation continued until ca. 1,000 B.P., when a simultaneous increase in population density and territoriality appears to have restricted access to Elkhorn Slough, forcing interior populations to move their settlements closer to San Felipe Lake and intensify their use of the local lacustrine resource base.

Central California Coastal Prehistory: A View from Little Pico Creek. Terry L. Jones and Georgie Waugh. University of California, Los Angeles, Perspectives in California Archaeology, Vol. 3, 1995, 186 pp., 68 figs., 120 tables, 3 appendices, bibliography, index, $22.00 (paper).

Traditional formulations of gender, as they have been applied to prehistoric subsistence practices and work organization in California, have sometimes served to mask or obfuscate aspects of adaptive variation. This is particularly true of more ancient lifeways, such as those subsumed under the Milling Stone Horizon, that are not so easily recognized in the cultural landscape of ethnographic California. In this paper, it is argued that gender organization was much less circumscribed during the Milling Stone Horizon; the procurement and processing of major plant and animal staples were the domain of comparatively heterogeneous task groups, incorporating men, women, and children. In the face of mid-Holocene environmental stress, and dispersed but increasingly dense populations, a demographically inclusive, low-bulk foraging strategy may have provided a reasonable solution to the challenges of food gathering. Further, this lack of polarity in gender relationships had social and ideological dimensions, manifested in the absence of explicit gender referents in burial associations. The dynamics of gender and its relationship to work organization are considered crucial to the understanding of prehistoric culture change in California.

Early Hunter-Gatherers of the California Coast. Jon M. Erlandson. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1994, 336 pp., 73 tables, 47 figs., bibliography, index (hard cover), $45.00.