The Archaeology and Historical Ecology of Late Holocene San Miguel Island Torben C. Rick Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007. [Perspectives in California Archaeology 8.] Xii + 180 pp., 55 figs., 53 tables, references, index, $70 (hard cover), $40 (paper).

These examples of the research potential of small sites in two neighboring regions of coastal California should drive home the point that small sites turn out to have considerable relevance to regional research once the commitment is made to understand their role in regionally based cultural systems. Small sites such as CA-SBA-1582 are significant to regional research because of their unique contents, whereas the small sites in northern Vandenberg Air Force Base are so because of the patterns of variation in their contents and their spatial relationships to one another. In both cases, the testing of behavioral hypotheses accounting for their contents must rely on knowledge of their distribution and abundance and their relationships with large sites.

The Island Chumash, Behavioral Ecology of a Maritime Society Douglas J. Keimett. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.310 pp., 22 b/w photographs, 23 line illustrations, 15 maps, 20 tables, $60 (cloth).

As members of the advisory board of the University of Utah Anthropological Papers, Duncan Metcalfe and James O'Connell point out that the University of Utah Press cannot afford to publish the reams of data that accompany some submissions of monograph-length reports, even though the stated goal of the series is to publish research "in full." Recognizing the value of making data available to interested researchers, they offer two solutions: (1) publish only those data "needed to insure basic comprehension" and encourage authors to make the complete data available for the asking in machine-readable form, or (2) publish the data in a "highly compressed format" with the paper. These two proposals do not limit the possibilities, and I offer here a third.

A hasty conclusion to this evaluation of the models of Inezeño economic organization and the evidence supporting them might be that the models should be set aside and attention devoted to ascertaining archaeological (and environmental) facts before returning to model-building. This is reasonable, but it must be remembered that the facts we look for (e.g., small pieces of salmonid bones) and the techniques used to obtain them (e.g., fine screening) imply that certain kinds of information are necessary to test such models as these. It cannot be denied that the presentation of the models, however flawed they might be, has had the effect of focusing our attention on problems that otherwise probably would not be recognized. So as we set out to seek more facts, we should also be refining our models. The two enterprises go hand-in-hand.

The Material Culture of the Chumash Interaction Sphere, Vol IV: Ceremonial Paraphernalia, Games, and Amusements.Travis Hudson and Thomas C. Blackburn. Los Altos: Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 30 (Ballena Press/Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Cooperative Publication), 1986, 457 pp., 310 figs., 3 tables, 1 map, index, $29.95 (paper), $47.95 (cloth).

The distribution through time of radiocarbon dates is an important source of information about regional population fluctuation. However, a number of factors affecting distributional patterns must be considered when inferring changes in relative population size. Because these factors often are difficult to control, fluctuation in a date distribution is best considered a source of hypotheses about population growth and decline that should be tested against other sources of data. Three date distributions pertaining to the Santa Barbara Channel mainland coast, the northern Channel Islands, and the Vandenberg region exemplify the potential of this approach. These areas show similarities that may be linked to the impact of environmental events affecting broad geographic areas, as well as to differences that appear to reflect the impact of differing environments on cultural development. Future use of radiocarbon date distributions will be enhanced if archaeologists make every effort to obtain dates for every site investigated, take greater care in selecting samples, and report dating results in a systematic format.

The Arizona Strip and adjacent areas in Utah and Nevada are in a very marginal environment. This dissertation investigates how small-scale farmers who survived more than 1000 years in this area coped with the challenges of this marginal environment by examining how and why social interaction patterns varied over time in different parts of the region.

Artifact assemblages from this area that date between A.D. 200 and 1350 are characterized by widely distributed ceramics tempered with olivine, a volcanic mineral. Sources of olivine lie in the vicinity of Mt. Trumbull and Tuweep, near the northwestern part of the Grand Canyon. The olivine-tempered ceramics were distributed mostly westward from Mt. Trumbull, up to 100 km to the lowland Virgin area in southern Nevada.

Ultimately, the goal of this study is to understand why ceramic production and circulation patterns changed during the Ancestral Pueblo occupation of this peripheral area of the American Southwest. I hypothesize that ceramic production and regional interaction patterns were shaped in part by the need to minimize subsistence risk in this marginal agricultural environment.

To reconstruct ceramic production and consumption pattern, laser-ablation inductively couple plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) was conducted on 1,069 sherds from the Mt. Trumbull/Tuweep and the lowland Virgin areas, along with source clay samples collected from the same areas. To examine how the use of clay resources changed over time, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating was conducted on 113 sherd samples with compositional information.

The data presented here suggest that different environmental conditions favored different social interaction and local ceramic production patterns. In Mt. Trumbull, under unstable climatic conditions and low population density, near the beginning of the Puebloan occupation, pots moved along with human migration. Later, when populations were higher and environmental conditions were equally unstable, pots were moved through interregional trade. In addition, clay resource specialization was favored early but was replaced later by exclusive use of optimal clays when population numbers were higher. In the lowland Virgin area, exchange played an important role as a risk minimization strategy throughout the Puebloan occupation, but clay-resource specialization gained importance later on, when populations increased.