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Title: The Island Chumash, Behavioral Ecology of a Maritime Society Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 6 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Kelly M. Mann 1999 The Wintu and Their Neighbors: A Very Smail WorldSystem in Northern California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Grove, A., and Oliver Rackham 2001 The Nature of Mediterranean Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hildebrandt, William, and Terry Jones 2002 “Depletion of Prehistoric Pinniped Populations along the California and Oregon Coasts: Were Humans the Cause?” In Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature, Charles Kay and Randy Simmons, eds., pp. 72-110. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kay, Charles, and Randy Simmons (eds.) 2002 Wilderness and Political Ecology:Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature.Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kroeber, Theodora, and Robert Heizer 1968 Almost Ancestors: The First Californians. San Francisco: Sierra Club. Preston, William 2002 “Post-Columbian Wildlife Irruptions in California: Implications for Cultural and Environmental Understanding.” In Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature, Charles Kay and Randy Simmons, eds., pp. 111-140. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Tumer, Nancy 2004 Earth’s Blanket. Vancouver, Canada: Douglas & Macintyre. Reviews . Bright / Anderson / Glassow / Anderson 259 The Island Chumash, Behavioral Ecology of a Maritime Society Douglas J. Kennett. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. 310 pp.,22 b/w photographs, 23 line illustrations, 15 maps, 20 tables, $60 (cloth). Reviewed by Michael A. Glassow Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106-3210 Douglas Kennett’s The Island Chumash is an important contribution to our growing knowledge of the prehistory of the northern Channel Islands and will serve as a basic reference on the subject for many years to come. He has done an admirable job of compiling and integrating information from a large number of specific studies to produce a coherent, easy-to-read synthesis of the prehistory of these islands. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation (Kennett 1998), but in the book under review he has revised his set of theoretical arguments for interpreting the data patterning he identifies. After a brief introduction to the archaeology of the northern Channel Islands, Kennett presents the theoretical perspectives derived from Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) that he uses in developing explanations for different aspects of prehistoric cultural development on the islands. In the following two chapters, he summarizes knowledge of island environments and the status of archaeological research in the region, and in the next chapter presents an analysis of the geographic context of ethnohistorically documented Island Chumash village locations. The next two chapters are the core of the book, in which he presents his analysis of Island Chumash prehistory. He divides the prehistory into three broad periods, Early, Middle, and Late Holocene, and discusses the processes of cultural change within each of these periods. The concluding chapter, entitled “Synthesis,” includes an evaluation of cultural change with respect to the theoretical perspectives presented in the second chapter, although it is obvious that these perspectives also guided the analysis presented in the two core chapters. Overall, Kennett’s study is well organized and clearly written. There are some notable features of the book worth highlighting. First, Kennett’s discussions of the theoretical perspectives he uses are more lucid than is often the case;