Reconstructing Prehistoric Plant Use on Santa Cruz Island

Within the Santa Barbara Channel region, current understanding of the use of plant food resources is largely based on assumptions from ethnographic records and a few kinds of artifacts associated with food processing. The proposed study would generate evidence to challenge or confirm these assumptions through the combined analysis of both macrobotanical remains (e.g., charred seeds), and microbotanical remains (both starch grains and phytoliths) extracted from the surface of ground stone artifacts. While certain resources (e.g., nuts and seeds) are likely to preserve as carbonized macrobotanicals, others (e.g., grasses, roots, tubers) can only be recovered through microbotanical analysis. Therefore, this combined approach allows for the recovery of a much wider range of plant taxa used as food resources, and thus for a fuller understanding of the prehistoric diet. The goals of this project are (1) to recover archaeobotanical data from two middle Holocene (6,650 to 3,350 RYBP) sites in Santa Cruz Island's Central Valley (within UC's Santa Cruz Island Reserve), and (2) to expand the existing comparative collection of California native plants housed at UCSB, in order to facilitate species identifications for this, and future, regional studies.

在圣巴巴拉海峡（Santa Barbara Channel）区域内，当前学界对当地植物性食物资源利用情况的认知，大多基于民族志记录的推断以及少量与食物加工相关的人工制品遗存。本研究拟通过对从磨制石器（ground stone artifacts）表面提取的大植物遗存（macrobotanical remains，如炭化种子）与微植物遗存（microbotanical remains，涵盖淀粉粒与植硅体（phytoliths））开展联合分析，获取可验证或推翻上述推断的实证数据。尽管部分植物资源（如坚果与种子）可作为炭化大植物遗存得以保存，但另一些资源（如草本植物、块根与块茎）仅能通过微植物遗存分析方法被提取与识别。因此，该联合分析方法可覆盖更多被用作食物资源的植物分类群，从而更全面地揭示史前人类的饮食结构。本项目的研究目标有二：其一，从圣克鲁兹岛中央山谷（隶属于加州大学（University of California, UC）圣克鲁兹岛保护区）的两处中全新世（距今6650至3350放射性碳年，RYBP）遗址中获取考古植物学遗存数据；其二，扩充加州大学圣巴巴拉分校（University of California, Santa Barbara, UCSB）馆藏的加州本土植物对照标本集，以助力本次及未来区域考古植物学研究中的物种鉴定工作。