#SouternCalifornia landscape and region cannot be understood without listening to the stories of #Indigenous people who managed the land and thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers.
In this project, our team blended geographers, historians, and biologists with representatives of three tribes — #Chumash, #Tataviam, and #Gabrieleño — to undertake a collective investigation of six village sites and their natural features as they would have existed before European arrival.
The resulting effort, funded by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation since 2020, blends different approaches to understanding and describing the landscape to produce a set of parallel products that describe the six village sites in detail and provide detailed maps of the natural environment, its flora and fauna, and tools to understand its influence into the modern era for the region.
This project is unique because a commonly shared, detailed map of the historical ecology—the flora, fauna, hydrology, and landforms, that evolved within Southern California’s Mediterranean climate over millennia and supported human populations for 9,000 years, has not previously been developed.
Individually and cumulatively, the results of this research are vital resources to all regional and local planning efforts involving sustainability, habitat restoration, and preparing for climate change.
This project is also unique also because four of its co-Principal Investigators are members of the Indigenous peoples of the Los Angeles Basin (Gabrieleño, Tataviam, and Chumash).
https://lalandscapehistory.org/2023-final-report/
Amaya 🌹
Chuck Darwin