Archaeological excavations in coastal California and on the offshore Channel Islands customarily produce scant evidence of the prehistoric presence or cultural use of the three species of albatross that visit the area. However, recent investigations on San Clemente Island reveal dense concentrations of two species of albatross that are dated to a narrow Middle Holocene time period. At nearby San Nicolas Island, a similar concentration of the same two species was dated later in the Holocene. This report describes these unique avian archaeofaunas and suggests that concentrations of the remains of these birds in an area where they are rarely recovered may reflect attempts by immigrant birds to colonize the Channel Islands. The vulnerability of breeding albatrosses to intense predation by early hunter-gatherers is also discussed.

A recently discovered collection of fired clay artifacts from the Little Harbor Site (CASCAI- 17) on Santa Catalina Island establishes that an indigenous ceramic craft had developed on the Channel Islands of Southern California by hunter-gatherer-fishers during the Middle Holocene, possibly as early as 5,000 years ago. This predates any influence from the Southwest and is coeval with the earliest ceramics discovered in the western hemisphere. The Little Harbor fired clay objects appear to be associated with a similar ceramic technology that is being revealed at some Southern California mainland coastal sites, especially in Orange and Riverside counties to the east. If so, the Little Harbor collection of fired clay artifacts supports the idea of a dynamic Middle Holocene socioeconomic interaction sphere connecting the southern Channel Islands and the mainland.

Numerous previously unidentified bony ossicles recovered from two archaeological sites in the Southern California channel islands (CA-SCLI-43, Eel Point on San Clemente Island and CA-SCAI-17, Little Harbor on Santa Catalina Island), as well as at a Santa Barbara County coastal site, are now known to be remains of the giant ocean sunfish Mola mola (Linnaeus 1758), a creature which can weigh more than 3000 pounds. This compels reevaluation of fish resources and fishing technology available to the earliest inhabitants of the southern archipelago and coast as well as reassessment of certain lines of thought about resource intensification. Although a few cursory and sometimes divergent analyses of fishbone recovered from these sites have been published, our identification of large quantities of Mola elements impacts current understanding of prehistoric resource abundance, fishing technique, and possibly even human health and mortality.

A model of prehistoric marine mammal overexploitation advanced by Hildebrandt and Jones (1992) for the northeastern Pacific has been challenged by Colten (1995) and Colten and Arnold (1998) who argue that diachronic patterns in faunal remains from California's Channel Islands reflect climatically-induced decline in marine productivity and local socio-cultural developments not overpredation. In this paper, we point out that some Channel Islands faunal trends are consistent with overexploitation, while others reflect methodological variation between studies. Newly available paleoenvironmental data raise questions about previous characterizations of late Holocene marine productivity, while new zooarchaeological findings from Monterey Bay, San Miguel and San Clemente Islands provide strong support for overexploitation in ways not envisioned in the original model. Such findings show that linear optimal foraging constructs may not account for all local variation in faunal assemblages, but still provide powerful explanations for broad patterns over time and can further provide useful insights into prehistoric human ecology.