Multi-scalar foraging decisions in the Santa Barbara Channel, southern California

• Modeling can give a new perspective on problems of poor preservation, drowned sites.
• People evaluated different resources at different spatial scales.
• Value of a resource to diet is not equivalent to its value in settlement decisions.

sHunter-gatherer decisions about where to live were influenced by many behaviors, some easier to see in the archaeological record (i.e. hunting or trapping vertebrates, gathering shellfish, quarrying and flint knapping) and some more difficult (i.e. gathering and processing plants, environmental variability, spiritual meaning, social relationships). Spatial modeling provides a tool to examine some of those decisions based on how they influenced the location of sites. This study uses the tenets of central place foraging theory to build a multi-scalar settlement model for the Santa Barbara Channel of southern California, where rising sea levels during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene erased a large portion of the existing archaeological record and studies of macrobotanical remains are limited. The model is evaluated through comparison with the archaeological record, and reveals a complex set of priorities in decisions about landscape use. People appear to have evaluated different resource categories—freshwater, protein, carbohydrates, and lithic raw materials—at different spatial scales depending in part on their importance to subsistence but also on the variable productivity and distribution of the resources themselves. Spatial modeling has considerable potential for both analyzing the existing record and generating hypotheses for future research.