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Thirty Years After: 1974 Excavations at Kirk Creek, CA-MNT-238, on the Big Sur Coast
By Patricia Mikkelsen, William Hildebrandt, Deborah Jones, Jeffrey Rosenthal, and Robert Gibson
Occasional Paper No. 18, San Luis Obispo County Archaeological Society 2005

The site, excavated in 1974, was a rich prehistoric shell midden deposit on a terrace adjacent to Highway 1 on the Big Sur Coast of California. The report reflects the unique project history, including personal recollections, a discussion of Native American lifeways and participation in the project, analysis and interpretation of 30-year-old data, and concluding with a hypothetical scenario of how it might have been for the early inhabitants of this stretch of coast.

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Land and Resources Management:

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Alturas, Eagle Lake, and Surprise field offices are in the process of preparing a Resource Management Plan (RMP) for roughly 2.8 million acres of public lands in northeastern California and northwestern Nevada. As part of this process, Far Western was contracted to prepare a Class I Cultural Resource Overview and Working Research Design, needed to inform management decisions.

The study culminated in a sophisticated sensitivity model developed using “weights of evidence” as a means of predicting prehistoric archaeological site distributions. The model incorporated site and survey locational information provided by the BLM, Forest Service, Caltrans, and the Northeastern Information Center of the California Historical Resource Information System to generate predicted densities of site locations.  Over 3,250 sites and 370,000 acres of survey were fed into the GIS-based model which addressed a suite of environmental variables including slope, landform, distance to water, and vegetation. 

Two other goals of the study were to identify land use conflicts and data gaps. Using the predictive model, GIS layers were developed to show the relationship between planned land use (grazing allotments, juniper cover) and culturally sensitive landforms. The model is intended to aid resource managers in identifying potential areas of conflict. The management recommendations emphasize that this exercise is intended as a general guide for resource managers, and that planned actions need to be evaluated on a project specific basis. Our analysis also revealed specific areas where the existing cultural resource data base could be improved to better serve both research and resource management.