Acorns, Shellfish, and Uplands: Archaeology in the Santa Cruz Mountains

The archaeological record of the Santa Cruz Mountains, particularly around the San Vicente Creek Watershed, provides evidence of human occupation and utilization from approximately 4000 BP to the present. Despite extensive anthropogenic modifications??"resulting from over a century of logging, mining, and topographic restructuring??"the preserved deposits within this watershed offer a robust dataset for examining the longue durée of Indigenous land use, subsistence practices, and environmental stewardship. Employing a historical ecological approach, this study investigates resource use by the Cotoni people, an Indigenous Awaswas-speaking polity on the western slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains. This presentation discusses data on foodways and land management strategies within the watershed, and how archaeological research is playing an important role today in land conservation, ecological restoration, and other cultural heritage management concerns. It underscores the analytical potential of the archaeological record to further explore Indigenous stewardship practices and their relationship to foodways at a landscape scale.

Speaker: Alec Apodaca, UC Berkeley