Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

My primary points are that paleoenvironmental causes for apparent transitions are not considered in Hildebrandt's model, and that estuaries like Elkhorn Slough were most important not for their winter foods, but for their summer fisheries. To make these points, I reinterpret the relatively shallow cultural chronology employed by Hildebrandt and Mikkelson (1993) in the southern Santa Clara Valley, raise some concerns about sampling strategies appropriate for the characterization of wetland adaptations, and question whether die vertebrate faunal data reported by Hildebrandt truly reflect lacustrine intensification.