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• 1 media/Hillshade with Major Rivers.jpg media/Transverse Ranges with Major Rivers_18in.jpg 2018-11-28T15:41:58-08:00 ʔitiasup: [old] Southern California Landforms, Ecology, and the Sources of Abundance 105 image_header 2019-07-24T12:40:32-07:00 According to the Chumash there are three worlds.  All of Southern California--the entire world--is ʔitiasup: "the biggest island."  Two giant serpents, called maʔaqsiqʔitaʔsup, support ʔitiasup.  They sometimes tire and, shifting their bodies, cause earthquakes.
  
  Below ʔitiasup lies the underworld: cʔoyinasup, which is ruled by the nunašɨš.  Nunašɨš are powerful, dangerous, and malevolent beings who invade and haunt the world of mortals, causing havoc at will. 
  
  Above the mortal world of ʔitiasup is the third, supernatural world of the sky, called ?alapay, where Sloʔw, the eagle, rules as chief, assisted by Xiliw, the hawk.  Each year, two gods of the sky, Sun and Snilemun (Coyote), gather in a special place to play a game of chance for the fate of this world: 

  Sun stakes all kind of harvest products--acorns, deer, islay, chia, ducks and geese--and when Snilemun is the winner he cannot wait for the stakes to be distributed, but pulls open the door so that everything falls down into this world.  And we humans are involved in that game, for when Sun wins he receives his pay in human lives." (Blackburn, ed, pp 91-2)

  No culture understands Southern California better than the Chumashans, whose language is the oldest of all California tongues.  The Chumash, arriving by sea, first settled on Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) inhabiting and cultivating the Southern California region for more than 8,000 years.  Chumashan cosmology begins with a picture of abundance punctuated randomly by drought and death.
  
  On the very longue duree of millions of years, Southern California has been a land of great biological fecundity and abundance.  The region supports a mainly Mediterranean-type ecology, characterized by wet winters, dry summers, and mild temperatures (55F/13C in the coldest months of December and January; 72F/ 22C in the hottest months of July and August).
  
  While mild and abundant in plant and animal life, Southern California's climate is very unstable, swinging sharply from flood to draught in unpredictable cycles, from 1 to 5, 10, and 20--year intervals.  Trees, shrubs, flowers, and non-human animals adapted across the Pleistocene ages to survive the region's unstable drought cycles.  Its long dry summers created evolutionary pressures for many adaptation, such as seeds that go dormant, capable of germinating years later when a wet winter return.  The long dry season also led to frequent wildfires, so many species, like the Coast redwood, evolved cones and other seed-pods that will only unlock their seeds in fire.  The fire-resistant bark of several tree species, such as the Giant sequoia, help to explain their extraordinary longevity.
  
  The abundance of sun, rain, and nutrients encouraged the evolution of plant and animal species to enormous size and total ecological biomass.  The oldest, largest, and tallest trees on Earth are all native only to California.  The Giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) is the most massive tree on Earth, standing over 300 feet with trunks from 20 to 30 feet in diameter.  Individuals commonly live beyond 2,000 years, the oldest known is 3,500 years of age.  The Coastal redwood (Sequoia sempivierens) is the tallest tree on earth, reaching 379 feet (115.5 m), and also very long-lived, typically reaching 2,000 years.  The great Canyon live oak  and Valley oak , native are also the largest in the world.  The largest plant-eating mammals ever to stalk the earth: the Columbian mammoth and largest carnivorous mammal, the Short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), also thrived here until the arrival of Homo sapiens.
  
  ʔitiasup enjoys an abundance enabled by the geologic structures of the region and climate, but those resources have been magnified throughout the Pleistocene by the actions of its mammalian inhabitants.  First the megafaunal mammals, and then humans, actively shaped the ecology by intensifying the resource yields.  Humans, who did not evolve in this climate, have had to struggle through cycles of feasts and famines.  The Chumashans and other global migrants to this land developed acorn-centered storage economies to bank against the years when Sun won the annual game of chance against humanity's champion, Coyote of the Sky.  They also practiced a fire management of their gathering lands, clearing the prairies and plains for maximum floral and faunal yields.
  
  Resource magnification, in turn, encouraged life and violent death on an enormous scale. Giant mammoths, mastodons, and sloths and their proportionally giant predators, bears, lions and cats, fought with outsized teeth, claws, tusks, and bulk, trampling the landscape and consuming its biomass, generating even more regional wealth even as they died and decayed.
  
  When the Chumash arrived 8,500 years ago, they continued these patterns: magnifying the fecundity of an abundant ecology, and evolving a culture and violent means to maintain control of that abundance.  The environment and ecology of the Southern California region is a dual product of its geologic landforms and of the mammals who have created an ecology for time immemorial.
  
  Southern California takes is shape and environmental ecology from the "Transverse Ranges," which begin at Point Conception and run along a west-east axis for about 300 miles.  The coastline also takes an west-east turn, creating what is known as the "Southern California Bight."  Ocean beaches in the Bight face more southerly than westerly, maximizing the daily sun exposure and producing rich marine ecologies. 
  
  The slopes of Transverse Range mountains also face southward, absorbing maximum solar power.  Valleys and their watersheds between the Transverse Ranges drain southerly and south-westerly to the ocean, forming large alluvial coastal plains cooled by ocean breezes along protected coastlines. 
  
  Southern California's  status as a coherent region begins with these landforms, which run at right-angles to the rest of California, whose Coastal  and Sierra Nevada ranges, coastline, and internal valleys run along a north-south axis, reflecting the edges of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates that formed them.  It's status as a distinct region also begins with its Mediterranean climate.  Geography, however, has not determined the region's ecological destiny.  Rather, it was mammal-formed.
  
  At the heart of the Southern California Bight is the Los Angeles Basin, a vast, 1,400-square mile system of plains and valleys that drain the southernmost of the Transverse Ranges: The Santa Monica, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains.  The rivers, as we know them today, are the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Rio Hondo and the Santa Ana.  Over millions of years, these ranges shed their rocky bulk during rainy seasons and winter ice melts, eroding gravels into the valleys below, so that the rivers today run on top of very deep alluvial deposits (as deep as 5 miles) that have filled the once-deep valleys into nearly level plains.
  
  Due the great size of their watersheds, the rivers of the Los Angeles Basin are violent and unstable.  Each floods powerfully during winter rains and then sinks below ground into the alluvial gravels during the summer months.  The volume of water each carries varies greatly from year to year, producing unpredictable cycles of flood and drought.  During the great flood during the winter of 1862-1863, "the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and Santa Ana Rivers merged, emptying into to the ocean as an 18-mile wide river between Signal Hill and Huntington Beach."  The following two years experienced a severe drought, killing almost 100,000 cattle and hundreds of thousands of grape vines, fruit trees, and other crops.  In the Santa Barbara section of the Southern California coast north of Point Mugu (muwu in Chumash), shorter valleys run westward to the sea.  Watersheds are relatively small there, so the rivers and creeks draining them are not subject to as violent floods, as those in the Los Angeles Basin. 
  
  Not only the timing of their floods, but the above-ground courses of the Los Angeles Basin rivers have varied dramatically over the millennia and centuries.  The Los Angeles River has normally run west-to-east along the southern rim of the San Fernando Valley, but it has sometimes run along a north-south path from the watershed's northern reaches in the Simi Hills, on the northern rim of the San Fernando Valley, to the southern rim.  Its drainage from the San Fernando Valley has always run through the bedrock gap in the Santa Monica Mountains at the Glendale Narrows, through present-day Downtown Los Angeles (the ancient village of Yaangna), which makes that section its only fixed course along its 55-mile length.  But from there it has run due south to San Pedro Bay for some of its long life, and it has also, as recently as the early 19th century, run due west, emptying into the Santa Monica Bay.
  
  By the time of the Pliocene, about 5.3 million years ago, the work of the Los Angeles Basin river drainages had created thousands of square miles of alluvial plains: richly fertilized with the biomass of countless generations of foliage and animals. Gigantic land mammals: mammoths weighing more than 10 metric tons (22,000 lbs) and giant ground sloths weighing 8 metric tons, fed on the abundant grasses, shrubs, and nut-bearing trees of this lush Mediterranean ecosystem.  Predators evolved to match their prey: giant lions, cats and bears-the largest mammalian land carnivores that ever lived. 
  
  The natural ecology of the Los Angeles Basin has always been shaped by the animals who fed upon it.  The massive stomping of the flatlands by megafauna such as the 20-ton Columbian Mammoth, who spent their days grazing, browsing, and being chased by giant fast-moving predators, would have mammal-formed the landscape.  Incessant pounding by multi-ton creatures would have prevented forests from spreading into the valleys and plains.  Plants and animals of all genera then adapted to the large,  treeless plains, leading to huge populations of subterranean dwellers, such as the Giant Kangaroo Rat, jackrabbits, and their ground-dwelling predators: the San Joaquin Kit Fox, burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, and tarantulas. (P. Schiffman)
  
  The groundwork and seed-collecting diet of the herbivorian tunnel-dwellers turned the soil and made the prairies ripe for a plethora of fruit- and seed-bearing low ground-cover: wild grapes, manzanita berries, and flowers, especially flowers.  The prairies of pre-European California were not grasslands but forb-lands: their characteristic annuals were annual flowers rather than grasses, California's native wildflowers were are much better adapted to the unpredictable wet-dry variability of the Central and Southern California coastal and inland plains.
  
  Two groups of mammals have fundamentally shaped the ecology of the Los Angeles Basin in deep and more recent time: megafauna and Humans.  Megafauna created the prairies through stomping until their extinction at the hands of Homo sapiens in the catastrophic collapse of circa 10,500 BCE (12,500 years ago). Clovis people, the first wave of Human intruders, entered the region about 13,000 years ago, hunted the giant mammals to extinction and then left the scene.   
  
  After the return of humanity, with the Chumashan migration of circa 8,500 years ago, until the Spanish conquest of the 1769-1822 period, the coastal and inland prairies were maintained and cultivated by annual fire management.  Chumashans and Uto-Aztecans who dwelt for thousands of years in Southern California intentionally set the fields alight after harvesting the seeds of the wildflowers.  These prescribed burns maintained the open "parkland" ecology of the huge coastal and inland plains, preventing brush-lands, called chaparral, and forests from spreading to lower elevations.  This fire management intensified the yields  of wildflowers, fruits, nuts, and berries, which in turn supported dense populations.
  
  The forests that ringed the fruitful plains oak savannas and woodlands at the lower elevations and coniferous forests in the mountainous regions.  The acorns of these oaks, dominated by the coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) and the valley oak (Quercus lobata), were also the core food source of most Southern California peoples.  Fire management also optimized the spacing, yields, and healths of these ancient trees.  Coast live oaks reach 300 years in age, while the larger valley oak reaches 500 years of age.  All three are among the largest trees on earth.
  
  The super-abundance of the Southern California Bight that characterized the eco-economy of the indigenous Chumashans and Uto-Aztecans at the time of European contact circa 1769, was the work of many hundreds of generations of human cultivators, making it impossible to say what a pre-human state of the ecology ever had been. 
  
  After the collapse of the megafaunal ecology during the extinction of circa 10,000 years ago, the mountain forests may well have spread into the plains and prairies, had not humans returned around 8,000 years ago.  These permanent, sedentary populations of hunter-gatherers stepped-in to shape the landscape, through tending, weeding, and cultivating plant resources, and especially by frequent burning.  "Within the woodland-grass areas, fire reduces brush cover to favor a parkland of grasses, trees, and intermittent stands of brush. The effect is to lessen the hazards of wildfire, increase plant and animal productivity, and improve the flow of springs by maintaining a sub-climax condition.  The maintenance of a youthful stage of succession provides a favorable environment for deer." (Lewis, p. 54).  Deer and other large browsing mammals, such as elk and pronghorns in turn, were attractive prey for carnivores such as mountain lions and bobcats. 
  
  Woodlands at interface with grasslands in well-watered temperate zones are ideal environments for sedentary humans. Ancient oak forests [card] ring the edges of valleys between upper and lower grassland ecological zones.  Riparian zones host an abundance of plant and animal resource: meats, furs, building materials for shelters. The woodland-prairie interface has an elastic dynamic that is highly susceptible to manipulation.Note 
  
  Thousands of years of human husbandry prevented climax environments from forming, in which larger plants and trees spread and grow densely to fill every available niche.  In climax ecologies, ground cover and forest canopies block sunlight to smaller plants, minimizing saplings, fruits, buds, and spring profusions of these most edible items.  By burning prairie and plains annually to every few years, indigenous Californians created ideal, sub-climax environments for the oaks upon which they came to rely.  Especially at the edges of the mountains, fire-husbandry prevented conifers from advancing to lower elevations and blocking the sunlight around the oaks.  This management also increased the reach of the oaks into the open valleys, where savannas (plains dotted by widely-spaced trees) emerged.
  
  By the time Europeans reached California in the 16th-18th centuries, the landscape and ecology they encountered reflected the ancient work of mammals: first megafauna and then Humans.  European conquerors were amazed by Southern California's open, verdant, park-like appearance, by its large herds of elk and antelope, by the ease of hunting bear, deer, small mammals, and birds.  During the Portola Expedition of 1769-71, Spaniards were amazed by the fecundity of California, and of the Los Angeles Basin in particular, which they reported to be a bountiful garden.
  
  A garden it quite literally was indeed: a cultivated, husbanded, tended, and managed ecology, dominated by humans for thousands of years and by megafauna for hundreds of thousands before that.  The long-lived oak forests of human craft testify to the grand temporal scale on which this garden had been tended.  
  
  Southern California has been, since time immemorial, an anthropogenic ecology.  It has been characterized most of all by resource intensification: an optimizing of yields, which supported gigantic mammalians and then dense human populations.  This pattern is very ancient: persisting across three extremely different eras: the Pleistocene, the Holocene, and the Anthropocene.
   
• 1 2019-07-24T08:18:23-07:00 ʔitiasup: The Unstable Landforms and Ecology of Southern California 30 plain 2020-09-02T04:20:37-07:00 According to the Chumash there are three worlds.  Southern California and the entire mortal world is ʔitiasup, "the biggest island."  Two giant serpents, called maʔaqsiqʔitaʔsup, support ʔitiasup.  They sometimes tire and, shifting their bodies, cause earthquakes.
  
  Below ʔitiasup lies the underworld: cʔoyinasup, which is ruled by powerful, dangerous, and malevolent beings called the nunašɨš, who invade by night the world of mortals, haunting it with havoc. 
  
  Above the mortal world of ʔitiasup is the third, supernatural world of the sky, called ?alapay, where Sloʔw, the eagle, rules as chief, assisted by Xiliw, the hawk.  Each year, two gods of the sky, Sun and Snilemun (Coyote), gather in a special place to play a game of chance for the fate of this world: 

  Sun stakes all kind of harvest products--acorns, deer, islay, chia, ducks and geese--and when Snilemun is the winner he cannot wait for the stakes to be distributed, but pulls open the door so that everything falls down into this world.  And we humans are involved in that game, for when Sun wins he receives his pay in human lives." (Blackburn, ed, pp 91-2)

  No culture understands Southern California better than the Chumashans, whose language is the oldest of all California tongues.  The Chumash, arriving by sea, first settled on Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) inhabiting and cultivating the Southern California region for more than 8,000 years. Chumashan cosmology begins with a picture of overall abundance punctuated randomly by drought and death.  
  
  Over millions of years, Southern California has been a land of great biological abundance, fostered by its Mediterranean-type environment of hot, dry summers and warm, wet winters.  Occurring between latitudes 23 and 40 north and south of the equator, these bioregions, including coastal California, Chile, the Mediterranean Basin, and Australia, are typified by evergreens, drought- and fire-adapted vegetation, dense shrub lands, woodlands, and forests.  These are mild climates, but also highly unstable and dangerous ones.Note  Sea surface temperatures in the Santa Barbara Channel over the last 8,000 years present a record of wide variation.   The Medieval Climate Anomaly, for example, was a period of "epic droughts" over three centuries, from about 800 and 1350 of the Common Era.Note
  
  Southern California takes is geologic shape and environmental ecology from the "Transverse Ranges," which begin at Point Conception and run along a west-east axis for about 300 miles.  The coastline also takes an west-east turn, creating what is known as the "Southern California Bight." Ocean beaches in the Bight face more southerly than westerly, maximizing the daily sun exposure and producing rich marine ecologies in the of the Santa Barbara Channel.  The southward facing slopes of Transverse Range mountains absorb maximum solar power, sustaining huge conifer forests and their watersheds,  the verdant valleys that drain southerly and south-westerly to the ocean, forming large alluvial coastal plains cooled by ocean breezes along the protected coastline.
  
  At the heart of the Southern California Bight is the Los Angeles Basin, a vast, 1,400-square mile system of plains and valleys that drain the southernmost of the Transverse Ranges: The Santa Monica, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains.  These mountains shed their rocky bulk during rainy seasons and winter ice melts, eroding gravels into the valleys below, so that the rivers today run on top of very deep alluvial deposits (as deep as 5 miles) that have filled the once-deep valleys into nearly level plains.  The rivers, as we know them today, are the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Rio Hondo and the Santa Ana.   By the end of the Miocene and the onset of the Pliocene Epoch, about 5.3 million years ago, the work of the Los Angeles Basin river drainages had created thousands of square miles of alluvial plains: richly fertilized with the biomass of countless generations of foliage and animals.
  
  Life in the Southern California Bight has never been easy, however. The climate, while generous on average, is very unstable, swinging sharply from flood to draught in unpredictable cycles.  Even after the Medieaval Climatic Anomaly, annual rainfall in the Santa Barbara Channel in recent centuries, from 1600-1900 CE, shows dramatic variation.    Due the great size of their watersheds, the rivers of the Los Angeles Basin are proportionally violent and unstable.  Each flash-floods  during winter rains, often tearing boulders and trees from the mountainsides, and then sinks below ground into the alluvial gravels during the summer months.   During the great flood during the winter of 1861-2, when 50 inches of rain fell in just one month, "the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and Santa Ana Rivers merged, emptying into to the ocean as an 18-mile wide river."  And yet the years 1863-5 suffered a severe drought, killing almost 100,000 cattle and hundreds of thousands of grape vines, fruit trees, and other crops.  The bleached white bones from this die-off littered the landscape for years to come.  Similar die-offs, of the vast herds of bison, elk, and pronghorn, would have occurred many times.  Herd die-offs were brutal, but they nourished the soil, conserving energy for later generations.
  
  Despite these violent swings, the sheer natural abundance of on-average seasons has supported immense biomass: natural wealth in the form of ancient forests teeming with wildlife and gigantic beasts consuming fantastic volumes of vegetable and animal life.  That very richness has come with an inverse curse: violent competition for such riches.  During the long pre-human rule of the Pleistocene megafauna, this competition led to giantism and extreme ferocity.  During the human era, this competition led equally to violence, and also to highly possessive, sedentary, labor-intensive storage societies ruled by powerful aristocracies.