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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Landscape and Geological Processes
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fearc.2024.1438898
This article is part of the Research Topic Indigenous Stewardship of Cultural Landscapes and Heritage View all 3 articles

Indigenous Eco-Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future of Environmental Stewardship in Central Coastal California

Provisionally accepted
Alec Apodaca Alec Apodaca 1,2*Gabriel Sanchez Gabriel Sanchez 3Alexii Sigona Alexii Sigona 2,4Michael Grone Michael Grone 5Valentin Lopez Valentin Lopez 2Kent G. Lightfoot Kent G. Lightfoot 1
  • 1 Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
  • 2 Amah Mutsun Land Trust, Santa Cruz, United States
  • 3 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, United States
  • 4 University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
  • 5 California Department of Parks and Recreation, Santa Cruz, California, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (AMTB) has stewarded terrestrial and aquatic resources in central California since time immemorial. Successive waves of European and Euro-American colonization have sought to suppress and erode AMTB's relationship with land, stewardship, and natural resources. The Tribe has mobilized anthropological and historical ecological data that demonstrate the effect of long-term Indigenous stewardship through cultural burning and other resource stewardship strategies. These Indigenous landscape legacies have influenced ecosystem structure and the sustainability of culturally important species. This paper focuses on the process of bridging archaeological research with contemporary stewardship efforts related to protecting, preserving, and caring for Tribal cultural heritage that exists from a landscape perspective. The collaborative research has helped clarify the record of Tribal relationships with the environment and how those relationships have changed due to colonial land use regimes. In doing so, we highlight how an archaeological research program can be a building point of access to ancestral places, which is a critical step in Tribal-led initiatives of restoring traditional resource management and ecological resilience of plant and animal life on public lands. In addition, we discuss the benefits and limitations of applying ecoarchaeological research toward Tribal environmental stewardship. 1 Introduction Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies have developed as a direct response to critiques expressed by Indigenous peoples. They seek to make the practice of archaeology more equitable, inclusive, and transparent by recognizing the problematic histories that have made the relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples antagonistic and contentious (

    Keywords: Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, California archaeology, Collaborative archaeology, heritage management, Tribal archaeology

    Received: 26 May 2024; Accepted: 26 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Apodaca, Sanchez, Sigona, Grone, Lopez and Lightfoot. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Alec Apodaca, Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.