Unearthing the Past : Archeology: A project on San Clemente Island has yielded artifacts nearly 10,000 years old. The discoveries could change long-held notions about when and how humans first lived in California.

From the sandy depths of their excavations, the diggers have brought up bones and tools. They have found tiny decorative beads and complete dwellings.

But a Cal State Northridge archeological project on San Clemente Island is unearthing more than artifacts. It is uncovering a prehistoric Indian culture that may provide clues to how and when the first humans lived in California.

Under the direction of anthropologist Mark Raab, the Cal State Northridge excavation project on San Clemente--about 48 miles off the coast--has progressed for nearly five years. Crews of archeology and anthropology students work weekly shifts on the federally owned island, and their findings--items dating back nearly 10,000 years to the Ice Age--may help change long-held notions about prehistoric life.

Raab said the archeological evidence indicates that prehistoric Californians were on the Channel Islands, living off the sea, at the same time their counterparts were hunting mammoths and other big game on the North American mainland.

“What we are finding is that some of the first inhabitants of the New World were stalking nothing more dramatic than shellfish, as opposed to mammoths,” Raab said. “If that’s true, it means a whole new chapter in the peopling of the New World will have to be written along those lines.”

San Clemente, the southernmost of the eight Channel Islands, has a land surface of about 57 square miles and has been controlled by the Navy since 1934. A bombing target for decades, only about 10% of the island is still used by the Navy, including two square miles for missile testing. The rest remains natural environment, said Jan Larson, natural resources manager for the North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego, which manages the island.

The Indians are long gone from San Clemente, having left the island by 1829, according to records found in the Spanish missions.

However, much about the Indians--possibly related to the Gabrielinos who settled the Los Angeles Basin--remains in the island’s rich archeological deposits.

Under a federal mandate to preserve archeological sites on its properties, the Navy approached archeologists at UCLA and Cal State Northridge and entered into cooperative agreements to allow long-term study of the island. The Navy provides the researchers with housing, food and the aircraft that fly them there and back.

Raab, director of the Northridge university’s Center for Public Archeology, said the island is an archeological treasure because it has largely escaped development and erosion. He has headed preliminary excavations at a dozen sites as part of a survey of the island’s archeological resources.

In the sandy loam of the island, the students have unearthed numerous round “pit houses” in which Indians lived beneath roofs made of whale bones, driftwood and branches from island oak trees. The excavators have found stone hearths, tools made from sharpened bones and fishhooks carved from shells.

The midden pits where the Indians discarded shells offer a glimpse of what the Indians ate, which in turn documents the abundance or shortage of marine species over time. The middens, some larger than an acre, contain shells from abalone, snails, crabs and clams. There are also fish bones and the remains of sea urchins.

The middens also have been a key to charting the antiquity of the people who lived on San Clemente. Radiocarbon tests of materials found by UCLA researchers at Eel Point, such as burned wood from cooking fires, have yielded dates ranging from 9,400 to 9,800 years ago.

The tests are helping to corroborate similar findings on other Channel Islands, which place Indians on the islands nearly 5,000 years before it was previously believed they were there. Raab and Larson said the San Clemente dates are the most convincing because they are from materials that indisputably show the human touch.

Another exciting aspect of the project is that the burned wood found in the Eel Point midden was discovered at a depth of 15 feet--not the deepest, or oldest, layer of the midden. Raab said that by excavating farther, the researchers may find even older artifacts--possibly the earliest signs of humans in California, for which the best established dates currently range from 11,000 to 13,000 years ago.

Raab hopes to excavate deeper in the midden during the next two years.

“I am intrigued with the question of when the first humans came to California,” Raab said. “I think that in some ways one of our best chances to answer that question might be on the Channel Islands.”

The discoveries on San Clemente may also change long-held views of the way the first inhabitants of North America lived.

Raab said that while the dating of artifacts is already disproving theories that Indians did not inhabit the islands until about 5,000 years ago, the artifacts also contradict the previous view that sea-oriented people came after the hunters of big game.

“The prevailing view is that the first people were big-game hunters, and descendant from those hunters--because of the spread of population--were fishermen and people who exploited the sea,” he said.

But on San Clemente, Raab said, “we have people that were not hunting big game. These are people who were hunting sea animals and were collecting shellfish and fishing. So it may well be that even at the earliest levels in the New World, the people that came here practiced a variety of ways of life.”

Raab said the significance of the San Clemente project is just now beginning to find its way into academia through student theses and articles by faculty members. He hopes to continue the project for at least another five years.

So far, the Navy has been receptive. It recently awarded Raab a $115,000 grant to fund the activity on the island until next summer. The Navy’s agreement with Cal State Northridge ends then, but it probably will be extended, Larson said.

“The significance of what they are finding on the island is second to none,” he said.

In nearly five years, the Northridge team has amassed nearly 1,000 pounds of artifacts. The evaluation of what it all means is largely carried out in a small lab at the University. It is a place so crowded with computers, reference collections and shelves holding the analytical data and artifacts that it is known as the “submarine” by those involved in the project.

It is here that the not-so-glamorous work takes place. The artifacts are sorted and catalogued, and their descriptions are fed into a computer. Broken artifacts are carefully pieced together.

“It’s not much like ‘Indiana Jones,’ ” Raab said. “Some of our most exciting discoveries are not made in the field. They are made on the computer back here.”

It is from this work that the final theories about the Indians of San Clemente will be developed and, Raab and others hope, the mysteries about these early Californians solved.

“I hope that we can reveal a new chapter of human history in the Americas,” Raab said. “It’s very exciting. We have a sense of being pioneers.”