From the Archive – Southwest Center Researchers / Gary Nabhan
Long before the eclectic biologist E. 0. Wilson ( 1997) sought consilience through his attempts to unify biological and social sciences into one corpus of knowledge, Wilson collaborated with mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur on a theory of island biogeography that all but ignored the ancient influences of seafaring cultures in shaping the biota of various archipelagos. While numerous biologists have followed MacArthur and Wilson’s ( 1967) lead by charting the natural processes shaping the island biogeography of the Midriff islands (Soule and Sloan 1966; Case and Cody 1983), the cultural dispersal of native plants and animals across the Sea of Cortes has hardly been taken into account in these “pattern analyses” of the region’s biota.
In recent years, new opportunities to examine cultural dispersal have emerged. Analyses made possible by novel genetic tools can now be combined with recent revelations of oral history from Seri seafarers who have frequented the Midriff islands and who know of their ancestors’ activities on the islands. Archaeologists have found indigenous remains on San Esteban, Angel de la Guarda, San Lorenzo Norte y Sur and Tiburon islands, with dateable occupation sequences on San Esteban for a minimum of 350 years (Bowen 2000). We can now begin to reconcile data from cultural geography, genetics, and biogeography to track cultural dispersal with an unprecedented level of precision. A cohesive but curious story has begun to emerge from this unlikely partnership of genetic analyses performed in laboratories and oral history documentation in the field: historic seafarers of this arid region have carried with them flora and fauna which became established on islands other than those accessible by natural routes of dispersal (Nabhan in press; Petren and Case, 1996, 1997; Grismer 1994) […]
