ABSTRACT
Situated on North America's "left coast", California is famous for its sunshine, sparkling seas, and surf-and-sand culture. For archaeologists, the California coast may be best known for its diverse and populous Native American tribes, hunter-gatherer-fishers who attained high levels of cultural complexity long before Europeans arrived on the scene. From the 1950s to 1980s, claims for a human presence along the California coast as much as 125,000 to 40,000 years ago made the Pacific coast central to debate about the peopling of the Americas. In the most viable alternative to the Clovis First/Ice-free Corridor model, Knut Fladmark first fully articulated a coastal migration theory that proposed that Upper Paleolithic peoples may have followed the North Pacific coast from Asia into the Americas. Despite considerable variation in sea-surface temperatures, climate, and terrestrial ecology, California's Pacific coast is characterized by a similar suite of marine and aquatic resources.
