Here’s why you should go.īefore the arrival of Gaspar de Portola’s land expedition in 1769, the Chumash population in California was estimated at around 22,000. Astronomers and storytellers, their connection to the environment can be seen today in pictographs at places like Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park near Santa Barbara.Ī trip to Santa Rosa Island-where unique flora and fauna are threaded by hiking trails-offers a vivid understanding of not only the region’s deep Chumash history and culture, but North American history. The relatives of the modern-day Chumash weren’t just skilled boat makers, they were expert basket weavers and fishers who built thriving villages throughout the region, overseen by both male and female leaders in a matrilineal society. “We now have a greater appreciation for the diversity of lifestyles 13,000 years ago-they weren’t all Clovis hunters,” Johnson adds, referencing early people who migrated via the Bering Land Bridge and hunted mammoths. The Arlington Springs Man, as the bones were called, supports the theory of a coastal migration by the earliest people from Northeast Asia into the Americas. Johnson, Orr’s successor at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, determined that the bones were more than 13,000 years old-making them the oldest-known human remains in North America. During his many expeditions, he excavated entire Chumash villages, numerous graves, middens (or archaeological waste pile), as well as the large bones of pygmy mammoths, which roamed the island 10,000 years ago.īut nearly 40 years after his 1959 discovery, John R. Orr conducted fieldwork on windswept Santa Rosa for more than two decades. While digging in the island’s Arlington Canyon in 1959, archaeologist Phillip Orr discovered two femora that he suspected dated back to the late Pleistocene and brought them back to the mainland.

Archaeological intrigue lingers on this arid isle, the second largest in California’s Channel Islands National Park.

Ringed by aquamarine waters, Santa Rosa Island is a folded landscape of canyons, mountains, and hanging sea cliffs.

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