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Northern and Southern Valley Yokuts, has been estimated at 52,000 at historic contact (Cook, 1955; Moratto, 1984). CULTURAL SETTING For approximately the last 4,500 years, the outline of the archaeological record for central California has become reasonably well sketched. Research in archaeology began in the 1870s,with projects of sporadic excavations designed to supply museums with materials. By the 1940s, however, when California's prehistoric sites were first subject to widespread serious excavation, many of them had already been destroyed. Another problem for central California archaeology is the complexity of the archaeological record in an area inhabited for more than 10,000 years by a variety of cultural groups. The following culture history briefly describes the archaeology and prehistory of the San Joaquin Valley region. A primary goal of a culture history is to provide a diachronic or developmental approach to past lifeways, settlement patterns, and cultural processes. It should be pointed out that the paucity of historic literature forces archaeologists in general to deal with material culture, focusing on tools, technologies and inferences about the people who produced them. References to a specific cultural group may, therefore, refer to a tool assemblage and set of dates associated with those tools, and not so much to an ethnic and linguistic population. Archaeology The role of the physical environment is paramount to any description of San Joaquin Valley culture. Changes through time were responsible for population movements and for modifications in the type and nature of cultural interchanges. As discussed above,the stability of the abundance of food and material resources, coupled with a moderate climate, were conducive to a long settlement of the Tracy Lakes vicinity. Lithics found in this area are of the Western Pluvial Lakes and Fluted Point traditions, and have been identified as between 11,500 to 7500 years old (Heizer, 1938; Beck, 1972; Moratto, 1984) (Figure F 1). Based upon typology,it has been suggested that the Tracy Lakes vicinity was inhabited as long ago as 13,000 years b.p., or the end of the Pleistocene epoch (Moratto, 1984). The end of the last glaciations resulted in the emergence throughout the west of shallow lakes such as the Tracy Lakes. These pluvial lakes produced much more biomass than did deeper lakes, and are of high significance archaeologically because of their great resource-bearing capacity(Figure 172). Wetland plant species produced roots, stems, and seeds for food and fiber. As other water sources dried up, remaining bodies of freshwater attracted waterfowl,shorebirds,and mammals. This large environmental change, coupled with smaller, local modifications, spurred the growth of cultural variety and specialization as individual groups adapted to their changing habitats. 3