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).

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.

Skeletal Identification of California Sea Lions and Harbor Seals for Archaeologists. Jan C. Kasper. San Diego Museum of Man Ethnic Technology Notes No. 17, 1980, 34 pp.

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.

San Francisco Bay Archaeology: Sites Ala- 328, Ala-13, and Ala-12. Polly McW. Bickel. Berkeley: University of California Archaeological Research Facility Contributions No. 43, 1981, 375 pp., 12 plates, 11 maps, 112 tables (paper).

The initial objective of this study is to construct a model of general resource availability. Relevant mammalian resources are then considered in light of the various hunting techniques that were potentially available for resource exploitation. Alternative procurement strategies are evaluated by examining the range of possible combination of resources and hunting techniques. Each combination has discrete archaeological consequences that can be compared to extant archaeological data. Finally, the combination that best fits the data-and inferred to be the probable prehistoric hunting strategy-is evaluated in terms of the variables that may have led to its adoption.

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.