History of Ancient Los Angeles Was Driven By It's Wetlands
History of Ancient Los Angeles Was Driven by Its Wetlands, 8,000-Year Survey Finds
Feb 25,2014 0 Comments
It may be hard to visualize if youve been through drought-stricken southern California lately, but much of whats now Los Angeles was once a teeming wetland. And a new landmark survey going back 8,000 years has found that human settlement in the region has ebbed and flowed with the levels of the sea and the waters of the Los Angeles River.
Since 1989, a team of scientists has conducted scores of archaeological surveys, drilled dozens of cores into the coastal soil, and pored over countless microscopic fossils to reconstruct the environmental and human history of Los Angeles.
They found that the historical heart of L.A. has been the marshy flats now known as the Ballona wetlands.
Today, the wetlands are little more than a grassy inlet near the upscale development of Marina del Rey. But for much of prehistory, according to the teams results, human habitation in the region only flourished when those wetlands were at their healthiest.
This is one of the largest and most important archaeological studies ever conducted in southern California, said Dr. Richard Ciolek-Torello of Statistical Research, Inc., who helped lead more than 100 archaeologists in the research.
From a somewhat mysterious thousand-year abandonment of the region around 4000 B.C.E. to an equally sudden population explosion some 2,000 years ago, he said, the history of ancient L.A. seems to have been driven by its coastal marshes.
An artists depiction shows an early Tongva settlement in the Ballona Wetlands. The Tongva are thought to have first settled whats now the Los Angeles area between 9,000 and 2,500 years ago. (Detail of painting by by Mary Leighton Thomson)
Although other studies have dealt with aspects of aboriginal life or certain time periods, our studies deal with the entire sequence of occupation from the first evidence of human settlement in the Ballona area to the abandonment of the last site, he said.
Part of the research involved drilling 29 cores, each 15 meters deep, to map where and when different sediments were laid down as the landscape changed.
Meanwhile, teams of archaeologists reviewed decades worth of previous research, and conducted their own investigations.
We excavated thousands of cubic meters of soil, Ciolek-Torello said from El Segundo, where great hills of wind-blown sand once stood, to the inland neighborhood of Baldwin Hills, which used to overlook the coastal plain.
They report their results in the Journal of Wetland Archaeology .
Human occupation of the area likely began as long as 11,000 years ago, based on evidence elsewhere in Southern California , but in L.A. proper, theres no hard proof, his team says.
[ Read about 11,000-year-old sites recently found on the nearby Channel Islands .]
Any sites from that long ago are likely underwater, they explain, as sea levels rose by some 20 meters after the last great glacial melt.
Instead, the earliest evidence of human life on whats now dry land can be found overlooking the Ballona wetlands, where sites dated to 8,000 years ago have been found, harking back to when the area was a wide, shallow bay protected from the ocean by barrier islands formed by windblown sand.
There, big middens of processed shellfish like scallops and chione have been discovered, along with the remnants of animal bones and stone tools, the team reports.
Over the millennia, sediments from the Los Angeles River gradually closed off the barrier islands, turning the Ballonas open bay into an enclosed estuary, where saltwater mingled with fresh.
But around 6,000 years ago, the research found, evidence of human activity seems to vanish for nearly a thousand years.
One possible cause: Core samples show that around this time the sea levels dropped dramatically, and with it the amount of marine life. Without pulses of seawater to recharge the wetlands, the area became what the study authors call a brackish water lagoon.
But both time and tide continued, and the studys evidence suggests that the population of ancient Los Angeles reached its peak between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, when several hundred families settled on the bluffs overlooking the Ballona.
This population boom coincides with what Ciolek-Torellos colleagues call one of the most dramatic wet episodes during the last 8000 years, with sediment samples indicating that unusually heavy rains persisted over a period of about three centuries.
During this time, L.A.s wetlands were at their most productive, and evidence suggests that their inhabitants made the most of the fecundity, hunting deer and rabbits, milling seeds, and harvesting shellfish, sharks, and rays.
Hundreds of residential features and middens of trash have been found from this era, as well as a diverse array of artifacts and evidence of cremations and burials, suggesting a variety of social groups made their homes here, including the predecessors of the Tongva and Chumash who continue to call this region home.
The Bluff Creek area of the Ballona wetlands as it appears today. The Hollywood Hills, and behind them, the Verdugo Mountains, are seen in the distance. (Credit: Downtowngal)
As hunting camps gave way to villages, the droughts returned, and again many of its residents appeared to have abandoned the basin, only returning at the end of the prehistoric period.
[Read about related research: " Mass Grave of Prodigal Sons in California Poses Prehistoric Mystery "]
With the arrival of the Spanish and 1541 and the establishment of the first missions in the 1771, the rest is largely a matter of historical record, and more is preserved in the histories recounted by the Tongva and Chumash.
For Ciolek-Torellos team, the past 20 years of research demonstrate the importance of the once-wild waters that continue to flow through L.A., though now mostly they move through concrete channels.
[The results] teach us that climatic and environmental conditions are constantly changingoften dramatically, Ciolek-Torello said.
Some changes occur over periods of thousands of years, others over the course of centuries, and still others in a generation or a period of a few years.
This is very important today when we worry about global warming. Such events have occurred repeatedly in the past and we must recognize that we may be unable to control these changes.
Aboriginal people led a mobile lifestyle that allowed them to move to other areas as local conditions deteriorated, he added.
Although there is a lot of mobility in our society, we really dont have the option to abandon the L.A. Basin during periods of drought or flood.
Instead, we have to be prepared to deal with these changing conditions and mitigate their impacts on our culture.
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Follow the link in the article. 11,000 year old sites found on near by Channel Islands.
Where was "global warming" when they needed it ?!
LOL, good one Petey. It's really quite the study, and if combined with the discoveries on the Channel Island that are 11,000 years old, it makes for some interesting studies/information.
I did read another article when they recently discovered a camel skeleton, next they'll find a kangaroo skeleton.
Kavika,
Was the camel skeleton of prehistoric origin or was it more recent? Prehistoric camels were present in the area of the Western US; their decedents include the Alpaca. More recent camels were not native, but were imported by the US Army in the 1850's for supply transportation purposes by order of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in the Southwest, including California. The program was run by an Army officer named Beale and actually worked except for one problem. Horses and mules do not get along well with camels. With the coming of the Civil War, the project was dropped and many of the camels went feral. The last one seen alive was in 1941.
It was a prehistoric origin TTGA.
That reminds of an article published a couple of months ago, about finding and dating a horse skeletonin the Yukonthat was 700,000 years old. So much for the theory that the Euro's brought the first horses to America.
Invitation was sent a few minutes ago.
Those are known as Camelids. They were present in North America until the last ice age, at which time they went extinct in that area. This was probably the result of climate change, although hunting by early humans may have contributed. Their descendents in South America are the llamas and alpacas. In Asia and Africa they remained, possibly because they were domesticated rather than hunted.
That horse was probably Mesohippus. It was common all over North America, but wouldn't have been much use for riding or burden carrying, since, although it had all the characteristics of a modern horse, it was the size of a large dog. While it too went extinct in North America around the last ice age, in Asia and Europe it was bred in captivity for size and strength. That was the source of what we call horses today. Actually, the breed went all the way around the world, through Asia and Europe, growing in size and strength as it went, largely because of controlled breeding.
This is great. When I am traveling or out and about, I often wonder what the area looked like long ago. I love this stuff. I almost majored in anthropology at the university. My family and I would have starved.
No, it wasn't Mesophippus, this was a full sized horse, comparable to what we have today TTGA. I'll see if I can find the article again, and post it here.
I love this as well Grump. I'm happy that you didn't major anthropology, I wouldn't have wanted to see your and your family starve...I would have kept you supplied in Fry Bread....
Found it TTGA.
FAR OUT. That time frame actually takes us into the continental drift period. Wouldn't need an ice bridge then, the Bering Strait probably didn't even exist at that time. and there may even have been other places where the continents were still connected.
Sounds like the real question then becomes; what happened to them in the last 700,000 years, after the Bering Strait was formed and the species was isolated? I doubt that the folks from the article will tell us. Their focus seems to be tracing DNA and Genomes, rather than solving puzzles in Paleontology. We are faced with two known facts. First, that there was at least one full sized horse (probably more than one, since horses are herd animals) in North America 700,000 years ago. Second, that there were no horses in North America in the 15th Century. The question then becomes; what happened to change the first condition into the second? A Paleontologist would tell you that they either went extinct or evolved into something else, but that's a throw away line for TV, not an explanation. My guess is that they're going to be working on that question for a long time, and may never come up with a definitive answer (way too many variables).
A really interesting question. What happened to them, when did they go extinct? Guess I'll have to ask an Indian.