Only in the last few years have high-resolution paleoclimatic data become available from coastal southern California. Recent research in the California Channel Islands, drawing on some of these data, attributes settlement disruptions, disease, and violence to maritime subsistence distress attendant to elevated sea temperatures in the period from A.D. 1150 to 1300. A broad range of paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and human osteological data suggest that these stress indicators are more convincingly correlated with severe late Holocene drought episodes during a portion of the medieval climatic anomaly (ca. A.D. 800 to 1400). Based on these data, cultural changes in coastal southern California, including violence, declining health, and emergent social complexity, are similar to events documented in the American Southwest. Cultural adaptations in both regions appear to have been responding to persistent drought conditions during the late Holocene.

The concept of middle-range theory, arising over three decades ago in sociology, is reviewed. The concept was proposed as an approach to theorizing, urging consolidation of high-order theories with low-order empirical studies. The critical elements in such hierarchies are theories of a middle-range of abstraction. However, most current conceptions of “middle-range theory” in archaeology are far more narrowly conceived. Derived primarily from Binford's work, they continue the New Archaeology's attempt to develop a materialist epistemology for archaeology. In this view, principles of site formation processes are nearly synonymous with “middle-range theory.” The dangers to theory-building of this approach are outlined. Examples of middle-range theory that expand our capacity for explanation of cultural behavior are presented.

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Occupied from ca. 7040 B.C. to AD. 1400, the Eel Point Site (CA-SCLI-43) on San Clemente Island, California represents one of the longest sequences of near-continuous marine resource exploitation on the west coast of North America. Faunal remains suggest transitions from heavy exploitation of fur seals and sea lions during the early Holocene, to increased hunting of cetaceans at mid-Holocene, to a focus on sea otters and fish during the late Holocene. These trends are consistent with patterns of overexploitation and economic intensification on the California and Oregon mainland, but they also suggest watercraft-based hunting earlier on the island than elsewhere. Fur seal and sea lion bones mainly represent females and juveniles, indicating that exploitation of island rookeries was guided more by self-interest than by principles of game conservation. Two intervals of temporary site abandonment, ca. 6150-3970 B.C. and AD. 1020-1400, were both followed by periods of increased marine mammal exploi tation and may reflect intervals during which marine mammal populations rebounded. Broad scale diachronic trends in the zooarchaeological remains do not correlate with flux in paleo-sea temperatures and are best interpreted as products of overhunting and increased use of water craft over time.With the increasing application of opti ample, is commonly envisioned as a mal foraging and/or economic intensifica strictly natural or climatic phenomenon tion theories to models of hunter-gath routinely accommodated by simple adap erer subsistence (see Beaton 1991; Basgall tive adjustments and/or migrations by hu 1987; Broughton 1994, among others), mans (see Moratto 1984). These models long-standing cultural ecological interpre portray human/environmental relation tations of forager prehistory are coming ships as largely unidirectional; culture is under renewed scrutiny. Based on a perceived as being influenced by the nat premise of relentless human adaptation, ural environment, but there are often no many traditional cultural ecological inter catastrophes or violence and little consid pretations emphasize a limited rela eration of the possible impact of humans tionship between humans and their envi on their surroundings. In models in which ronment. Environmental change, for ex-the influence of hunter-gatherers on nat

Four current approaches to assessing archaeological significance in contract archaeology are reviewed. It is argued that three of these approaches are inadequate bases for assessing significance. Explicit, problem-oriented research designs seem to provide the most promising approach to the problem of archaeological significance.