The Sacramento Valley bottom has one of the richest archaeological records in California despite poor nut-crop resources that are the hallmark of California Indian subsistence. The nut-poor habitat fostered much earlier intensification of low-ranked small seeds in the Valley bottom than contemporaneous sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and North Coast Ranges, including a focus on use of goosefoot (Chenopodium spp.) seeds unique to central California. The Sacramento Valley also has the only central California record of intensive use of Themidaceae (Brodiaea complex) geophyte corms, suggesting these root crops were also low-ranked plant foods.

The Santa Clara Valley archaeobotanical record spans the central California Early, Middle, and Late periods. Sites CA‑SCL-12, -478, -674, and -919 have robust assemblages of plant remains from distinct periods which are used here to evaluate alternative models of plant use in interior and bayshore settings. The interior model is a better fit for the Santa Clara Valley, even for the near-shore site SCL-12. The existence in the South Bay of poorer and more difficult to access aquatic faunal resources appears to explain the greater focus on plant foods there than in the East and North Bay.

Food is one of the most tangible, persistent, and engrained elements of cultural behavior in any given society, past or present. Subsistence systems in California have been greatly elucidated in the past two decades through the study of the continually expanding archaeobotanical record. This special section of the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology (Volume 36, Nos. 1 and 2) situates paleoethnobotany in California by highlighting the research currently being conducted by scholars working in various coastal, island, and inland settings in the state. The California archaeobotanical record offers signi cant insights into the evolution of intensive plant exploitation by sedentary hunter-gatherers who maximized their use of a well-endowed but highly diverse environment. The breadth of papers presented here demonstrates the range of research issues that have been addressed using California archaeobotanical data, and suggests what that record might contribute to the resolution of archaeological problems in similar contexts elsewhere.