PCAS Activities: General Meetings
Monthly lecture meetings feature noted archaeologists and anthropologists who provide insight into a variety of topics. Lecture meetings are held at the Irvine Ranch Water District, 15600 Sand Canyon Avenue (between the I-5 and I-405, next to the Post Office) in Irvine, on the second Thursday of each month, at 7:30 pm.
You are invited to join the speaker and other PCAS members for dinner before the general meeting. It's an informal opportunity to visit with an acknowledged expert. We meet at 6:00 pm at Mimi's Cafe, 4030 Barranca Parkway (corner of Barranca and Culver), Irvine.
Schedule and Speakers
Please note that last minute changes may occur.
September 11, 2008
Polynesians to the New World: The Chumash Connection and Beyond
Kathryn A. Klar and Terry L. Jones
In 2005 in American Antiquity and Anthropological Linguistics, Dr. Kathryn Klar and Dr. Terry Jones described similarities in material culture (e.g., sewn plank boat construction, and compound bone fishhook styles) and complimentary linguistic evidence that suggest at least one contact event between the Chumash and Gabrielino of southern California and Polynesian voyageurs. Since then, scholars from the Pacific and California have challenged this hypothesis based on issues of chronology, ostensive limitations of Polynesian seafaring, and lack of support from oral history. In this presentation, they will provide an update on the case for Polynesian contact including new linguistic evidence, oral traditions from Hawaii and California, and a reassessment of the chronology of the contact event. They will also discuss substantive information from South America, including chicken DNA, compound bone fishhooks, sewn plank boats, and linguistic findings that indicate yet another Polynesia-New World nexus.
Dr. Jones is currently Professor of Anthropology and Chair, Department of Social Sciences, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis, in 1995. He has worked as a professional archaeologist for 30 years, mostly on the central California coast where he studies hunter-gatherer ecology and maritime adaptations. He has published over 30 scholarly articles in leading anthropological and archaeological journals including Current Anthropology, American Antiquity, and the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Dr. Jones has published eight books and edited volumes, including Prehistoric California: Archaeology and the Myth of Paradise (with L. Mark Raab) (University of Utah Press, 2004) and California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity (with Kathryn Klar) (Altamira Press, 2007). In 2008 he received the Martin A. Baumhoff Award for Special Achievement from the Society for California Archaeology and the California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Dr. Klar is a Lecturer in the Celtic Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977. Her specialties are historical-comparative and anthropological linguistics, as well as poetic metrics and text analysis. Her dissertation was Topics in Historical Chumash Grammar. Dr. Klar works primarily with Celtic, Chumashan, Tierra del Fuegan, and Polynesian languages, and she teaches Modern and Medieval Welsh and Old Irish at Berkeley. She has published several articles on historical Welsh metrics in The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies and Studia Celtica; articles on evidence for prehistoric Polynesian-Southern California contact in Anthropological Linguistics and American Antiquity; and other pieces in various journals on aspects of Chumashan historical grammar. In 2008 she received (along with Terry L. Jones) the Martin A. Baumhoff Award for Special Achievement from the Society for California Archaeology. She is currently writing a full biography of John Peabody Harrington.
October 9, 2008
Prehistoric Heated Rock Cooking Features of the Central Transverse Mountain Ranges
Douglas H. Milburn
Mr. Douglas Milburn currently serves as the Assistant Forest Archaeologist for the Angeles National Forest. He began his federal career with the USDI, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Navajo Reservation in 1971. In 1975, he transferred to the Sequoia National Forest. In 1978, he moved to the Angeles National Forest , where he has occupied his current position since 1992.
The presentation will focus on archaeological examinations of “earth ovens,” “grills,” and “burnt rock middens” found in the San Gabriel Mountains, Castaic Mountains, and the Cajon Pass Divide. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal indicates that heated rock cooking facilities were initially used by Archaic populations at desert margins of the Transverse Ranges more than 7500 years ago and that the use of these structures gradually became more commonplace during subsequent millennia. After about 2300 years ago, there was marked intensification in the firings of heated rock food cooking structures. Formally distinct rock-lined earth ovens, which are proposed as hallmarks for the arrival of Uto-Aztecans, also appear in the archaeological record at about that time. After 300 years ago, heated rock cooking appears to have declined in the Transverse Ranges. The spatial and temporal distributions of heated rock food structures serve as useful measures of resource intensification in the Transverse Ranges since the early Holocene.