Waters and Ravesloot (2001) test the assumption that natural river channel change caused periods of Hohokam cultural reorganization. However, they conclude that channel changes did not correlate with all periods and areas of significant cultural changes and that landscape alone cannot explain Hohokam transformations. An anthropological perspective on political ecology and disasters can explain why environmental processes and events differentially impact societies, differentially impact societies diachronically and differentially impact social groups within societies. We suggest that this perspective may explain the variability described by Waters and Ravesloot.

As stated in our original paper (Jones et al. 2002), the Cross Creek site is not of sufficient antiquity to challenge Clovis for temporal priority in western North America, but it pushes the age of the California Milling Stone culture back 2,000 years earlier than previous estimates. The Milling Stone culture and coastal adaptations on the southern California islands are so profoundly different from Clovis that they beg consideration of alternative colonization scenarios. Relying on old arguments and ignoring recently published findings, Turner (this issue) argues that there is insufficient evidence for a maritime culture on the central coast of California at the end of the Pleistocene. In our response, we further discuss implications of the findings from Cross Creek and other studies that support a coastal migration model.

We are pleased that Broughton and Bayham acknowledge that there was an increase in large-game hunting during the Middle Archaic (ca. 4000-1000 B.P.) in California and the Great Basin that reached proportions greater than any other interval during the Holocene. They argue, however, that this was simply the result of changing climatic conditions, and that the larger social context of hunting plays little or no role in this development. The following discussion identifies several weaknesses in their environmental determinism, and shows how a more comprehensive analysis of genders differentiated fitness and work organization provides greater explanatory power than the narrow, fauna-based approach they advocate.

A regional episode of erosion between A.D. 1020 and 1160 coincides with social, political, economic, and demographic changes in the Hohokam culture. This regional erosional event was of such magnitude that it accelerated cultural changes that were already underway. The Ensor et al. (2003) commentary and attempt to layer a number of hypotheses on our original interpretations are fraught with problems.