ABSTRACT
Archaeological field research on San Esteban and Tiburon islands in the Gulf of California, sponsored by Centro Regional Noroeste of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, has begun to reveal patterns of prehistoric hunters and gatherers of coastal Sonora. Archaeological research has begun to reconstruct the lifeways of a group of hunter-gatherers using -inferences from the ethnohistoric documentation and from the ethnographic descriptions of the Seri. In general the archaeology of Tiburon Island is similar to the rest of the Sonoran coast where common archaeological elements are open camps, stone circles, piled rocks, cairns, talus pits, pictographs, and stone figures. The chapter argues that there was little social differentiation beyond sex-based and age-based divisions of labor among the group inhabiting San Esteban and the south-southwestern coast of Tiburon. The ethnic group has continued a basically "traditional" economy up to the present, in spite of being embedded within a capitalist-dominant national economy.
