Were Polynesians in California before Columbus?

The Robert L. Stigler, Jr. Lecture in Archaeology at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 6, in Giffels Auditorium, Old Main, will feature Terry L. Jones, associate professor of anthropology, California Polytechnic State University, and Kathryn A. Klar, lecturer, Celtic Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, speaking on "Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Polynesian Contact with Southern California."  The collaboration of Jones and Klar sheds light on a puzzle: did Polynesians before Columbus sail to southern California?  Jones received his doctorate in 1995 from the University of California, Davis. He is the co-author of "Prehistoric California: Archaeology and the Myth of Paradise."

Jones is an acknowledged authority on California prehistory and adaptations to coastal, estuary and marine settings. Klar's undergraduate and graduate degrees in linguistics are from the University of California, Berkeley.  She was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship from 1971 through 1974. After a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship, she returned to Berkeley in 1978. Klar has taught in the departments of linguistics and comparative literature before her most recent appointment in 1989 to the Celtic Studies Program.  In 2000, she was honored as a Berkeley Language Center Fellow. Klar teaches Welsh, Welsh poetry, and has dealt extensively with native California languages including Chumash, which is central to hers and Jones' argument about Polynesian seafarers. Among Klar's current projects is a full-scale intellectual biography of American linguist and ethnologist John P. Harrington.