Early European explorers and missionaries who first set foot in Baja California described the peninsula as a harsh environment, lled with “savage” tribes of simplistic people (see Laylander 2000:96–100). these early explorers typically arrived in Baja California by way of Mesoamerica, and their views on the simplicity of the peninsular cultures were undoubtedly in uenced by the monumental architecture, agriculture, and robust material culture of the Mesoamericans. Written accounts of these first explorations have influenced perceptions of the peninsula and its inhabitants for generations, apparently leaving many researchers to consider the region as nothing more than a vast desert, as uncomplicated in its cultural landscape as it is in its ecological landscape. the hunter-gatherer- sher groups living in Baja California were overshadowed by their Mesoamerican neighbors and were left virtually unstudied for decades.

Recent research utilizing paleolandscape reconstruction and targeted underwater survey has led to 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 may be favorable for identifying evidence of late Pleistocene coastal occupations. Indeed, survey data identifying unique geomorphological and environmental characteristics clari es the various factors that made this region attractive to early hunter­gatherer populations, and also explains why Baja California may be integral in the search for some of the earliest coastal inhabitants of the New World.

Subsistence strategies of the hunter-gatherer-fishers who inhabited the Northern Channel Islands have included fishingsince 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 increase occurred during a time of significant technological innovation, marked population growth, and expansive environmental stress. Recent data collected from numerous sites across the Northern Channel Islands have been critical in understanding the behavioral response to the significant environmental stress and cultural changes characteristic of the transition from the Middle Period to the Late Period on the Islands. We contribute to this growing body of data with an analysis of fish remains from CA-SCRI-195, a well-preserved site deposit on Santa Cruz Island that spans a 1,500-year time period inclusive of the Middle and Late periods. The data from CA-SCRI-195 suggest that evidence of environmental variation, technological development, and changes in sociopolitical organization can all be identified in the data and all uniquely contributed to subsistence changes identified at the site. The patterns of distribution and the trends apparent in the identified fish remains from this study are an important contribution to the larger goal of understanding developments in economic and sociopolitical organization on the Northern Channel Islands.