Student Explorations Around Southern California: Acoustics, Paleolandscapes, and Environments at Sea (SEASCAPES)

Throughout time, the Earth’s physical environments are constantly shaped and reshaped by various forces. The movement of tectonic plates create mountains and plateaus; rivers swell or degrade with variations in precipitation and change course, cutting new channels or abandoning old ones; shifts in climate creates glaciers or deserts, causing shifts in ecosystems and associated species; rises and retractions of sea level floods coastal habitats or forces subtidal systems into intertidal habitats.

Paleo means ancient and typically is associated with the geologic past. So, a study considering changes that occurred on landscape thousands of years ago is a study of a paleolandscape. Much of the research done to understand the development of human-environmental dynamics through time incorporates data from the paleolandscapes to provide a picture of the land and habitats that were present at various times in the past. This picture is critical for understanding past ecosystems and considering how humans impacted and were impacted by their environment.

For the research conducted during the Student Explorations Around Southern California: Acoustics, Paleolandscapes, and Environments at Sea (SEASCAPES) project, identifying characteristics of the paleolandscape allows us to determine where across the landscape critical habitats and features were located and how humans may have interacted with these spaces through time. Identifying these human-environmental interactions in the past creates a more complete picture of the paleolandscape and informs definition of a maritime cultural landscape (MCLs) created and used by people for thousands of years (Westerdahl 1992).

MCLs are land- and sea-scapes that are created with cultural interactions that bridge the culturally constructed land/sea divide. In the Southern California Bight, sea level rise after the last glacial maximum inundated hundreds of kilometers of land, submerging some of the spaces used by the first peoples to arrive in the region at least 13,000 years ago. It is therefore critical to recognize the shifts that occurred on paleolandscape through time and “recognize maritime peoples’ fluid movement between land and sea across space and through time” (Gusick et al. 2022: p.33). This begins with recognition of the paleolandscape.

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By Dr. Amy Gusick, Project Co-Principal Investigator (with Jillian Maloney), Curator of Archaeology, Natural Museum of Los Angeles County and Dr. Margaret Morris, Expedition Collaborator, Post-Doctoral Scholar, University of Californian, San Diego

Published June 24, 2024