Kiara Anderson
Professor Fitzhugh
Archaeology 205
March 4, 2023
Make up Lab 5 – Dating
In this study they used 14 Carbon dating methods to analyze how old the fauna of marine shell
and charcoal samples were. They relied heavily on the dating marine shells for decades, but there is,
such debate about the use of 14 Carbon dating methods for marine shells due to the numerous
uncertainties and errors that can occur. However, the Daisy Cave results provided remarkably consistent
chronology for the paleontological and archaeological deposits found.
Some of the complications they had to deal with included problems with contamination, the
older wood, etc. Tin the beginning they mentioned that the cave had been disturbed and analyzed many
times before, and that caused some issues. Furthermore, the cave has deep deposits with heavy slopes
where identification by strata is difficult in terms of precision. They also had issues with the identification
of temporal fluctuations in upwelling and regional reservoir effect in the Santa Barbara Channel Region.
It is for this reason, they often dated both charcoal and shells from the same stratigraphic levels.
Temporal fluctuations in the upwelling showed results where the charcoal midpoint date would be
considerable older than they had expected. They concluded that because the of the temporal
fluctuations, the upwelling must have been quite extreme in its reservoir effect.
There were a few conclusions they had after analyzing the dating, one being that the Daisy Cave
was occupied repeatedly during the Late Holocene, and that sometimes in the past thousand years it
was used as a Chumash burial place. They also found that around 6720±150cal BP the occupation of the
site at this time was brief. Lastly the found that dated between ca.850and90calBP, the Early Holo-cene
archaeological deposits appear to have accumulated during repeated short-term occupations of the site.
Nonetheless, the extent and density of the refuse deposits suggest that the most intensive use of the
site dates to this time period.
While I would not say that I see weaknesses in their logic or conclusions, I am just a little
confused by them. For example, they explained how pine forest seemed to be present on the San Miguel
Island until around 12,500 BP. I am a little bit confused by this conclusion as it seemed a bit random, they
hardly mentioned pine trees prior, and I thought the point was to understand when people habituated
here.
If I was an archaeologist interested in human occupation here, I would do an anthropological
approach to the study and maybe talk with locals, or natives who may still be around, and if they have
ever heard of stories about perhaps their ancestors or another from the past.
