부산대학교 도서관

Until recently, with a few exceptions, California Islands were believed to be relatively impoverished in high-quality materials for making stone tools. This chapter summarizes the distributions of known mineral resources on the islands, including numerous sources identified during recent geoarchaeology surveys. For islands occupied since the Terminal Pleistocene, the availability of such resources may have changed significantly through time due to sea level rise and coastal erosion. There is spatial variability in the distribution of mineral resources, but we show that such resources were relatively abundant on many of California's islands. This has implications for understanding the antiquity of initial colonization of the islands, the development of exchange networks, and the marginality of island mineral resources.