The picture that emerges from the Channel Islands as a whole — from the terminal Pleistocene Arlington Springs individual through the early Holocene occupations at Daisy Cave and other sites to the documented Chumash of the historical period — is of an island landscape continuously inhabited, continuously exploited for marine resources, and continuously connected by maritime technology to the mainland coast.

This is a picture of deep continuity: people on the California coast for at least 13,000 years, maintaining the maritime skills that made island living possible across the radical environmental changes of the post-glacial period.

The Canyon And The Channel

Return, finally, to the physical place.

Arlington Canyon cuts through the interior of Santa Rosa Island from a spring source down to the coast.

In the late Pleistocene, the canyon was a different world from today: wetter, possibly wooded in places, with the stream that built the alluvial deposits still active, the cienaga or marshy area at the canyon bottom providing fresh water and the biological richness that comes with permanent water in a semi-arid landscape.