Few scholars have accepted the evidence presented so far for associations between humans and mammoths, but Orr described a number of other intriguing early sites that may place humans on Santa Rosa Island by the terminal Pleistocene. For several years, we have been studying these and other early Santa Rosa Island sites. We have yet to find evidence for a Pleistocene occupation of the island (Erlandson and Morris 1992), but several early Holocene sites offer evidence for the settlement of the island prior to 8,000 years ago (Erlandson 1992). One of these is an isolated human burial at CA-SRI-116, a large shell midden located near the mouth of Lobo Canyon on the northeast coast of the island (Fig. 1). In this paper, we report on a suite of radiocarbon dates for CA-SRI-116 and describe the available data on the stratigraphic context of the burial, its position, and its artifact associations.

Chumash consultants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century named 10 historic villages on Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Northern Channel Islands. Locational information for many of these villages is clear and archaeological sites with historic components substantiate their existence. Swaxil, reportedly the largest village on the Northern Channel Islands, was associated with Scorpion Anchorage on the eastern end of the island. Its existence has eluded archaeological detection and led to speculation that the historic locational information for this important village was incorrect. The authors recently recovered historic artifacts from archaeological deposits at the mouth of Scorpion Anchorage, substantiating the ethnohistoric claims of Swaxil's existence at this location. Furthermore, it is argued that the two archaeological sites at Smugglers Cove and Smugglers Point, located to the southeast of Scorpion Anchorage, are the remnants of Nanawani, the other village name associated with eastern Santa Cruz Island.