These problems are not likely to disappear anytime soon. Theoretical developments on a variety of fronts make it clear that the kinds of archaeological phenomena that must be investigated and interrelated to form reasonably comprehensive interpretations of given points in time are exceedingly diverse and therefore unlikely to yield to any single chronometric technique. Given these circumstances, the prudent archaeologist will seek to use as many techniques as possible, balancing their costs, reliability, and breadth of potential application. It is partly our purpose here to illustrate the use of a technique, lichenometry, that has until now enjoyed use principally in glacial geology but that would seem to deserve consideration in archaeology as well. As with any other chronometric technique, lichenometry has both advantages and disadvantages. We are certainly not holding it up as a panacea; it is hardly that. It is, however, a largely untapped source of information that should prove useful in developing comprehensive archaeological chronologies for some regions.
Author(s): Morris, Susan L.; Johnson, John R.; Schwartz, Steven J.; Vellanoweth, Rene L.; Farris, Glenn J.; Schwebel, Sara L. | Abstract: When the last San Nicolas Island resident, known as the ‘Lone Woman,’ was brought to Santa Barbara in 1853 after 18 years of solitude following the 1835 removal of her people to the mainland, efforts were made to locate speakers who could communicate with her. That search was reported to be unsuccessful, and the Lone Woman died seven weeks later, unable to recount her story. After the Lone Woman’s death, many accounts presumed that everyone from San Nicolas Island had died. Recent research in provincial Mexican papers, Los Angeles documents, American records, and church registers has uncovered original primary source information that details the experience of the Lone Woman’s people in Los Angeles. Five men, women, and children are con rmed or are likely to have come to the Los Angeles area from San Nicolas Island in 1835, and the parents of a newborn girl baptized the following year also may have come from that island.
Author(s): Jazwa, Christopher S.; Kennett, Douglas J. | Abstract: Point Bennett, on western San Miguel Island, California, was an important location for sea mammal hunting through time. We use stable oxygen isotopic (δ18O) measurements from California mussel (Mytilus californianus) shells to reconstruct a seasonal pattern of mussel harvesting by the human occupants of Point Bennett during three time intervals dated to the middle (~7,550 – 3,600 cal B.P.; CA-SMI-528, Stratum 3) and late (after ~3,600 cal B.P.; CA‑SMI-528, Stratum 1; CASMI-602) Holocene. During both periods of occupation at CA-SMI-528, mussel harvesting was primarily during the spring, coincident with onshore sea mammal breeding. This suggests a seasonal pattern of site occupation. At CA-SMI-602, mussel harvesting primarily occurred during the summer and fall. This is opposite when sea mammals are present in highest densities, suggesting year-round occupation. This shows how seasonality of mussel harvesting can be used alongside other indicators like seasonal availability of sea mammals to understand broader patterns of human mobility.
Author(s): Reddy, Seetha N.; Wohlgemuth, Eric | Abstract: Food is one of the most tangible, persistent, and engrained elements of cultural behavior in any given society, past or present. Subsistence systems in California have been greatly elucidated in the past two decades through the study of the continually expanding archaeobotanical record. This special section of the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology (Volume 36, Nos. 1 and 2) situates paleoethnobotany in California by highlighting the research currently being conducted by scholars working in various coastal, island, and inland settings in the state. The California archaeobotanical record offers signi cant insights into the evolution of intensive plant exploitation by sedentary hunter-gatherers who maximized their use of a well-endowed but highly diverse environment. The breadth of papers presented here demonstrates the range of research issues that have been addressed using California archaeobotanical data, and suggests what that record might contribute to the resolution of archaeological problems in similar contexts elsewhere.
Author(s): Nims, Reno; Gifford-Gonzalez, Diane; Hylkema, Mark; Potenzone, Kara | Abstract: Excavations of the Bonny Doon site (CA-SCR-9) in the Santa Cruz Mountains of northern Santa Cruz County, California by Hylkema in the late 1980s recovered a large and well-preserved faunal assemblage that spans the Early-Middle Period transition. With over 8,000 recorded specimens (from an estimated 12,000 total number of specimens [NSP]) and with demonstrated sampling to redundancy, the SCR-9 assemblage is one of the largest faunal samples in the region, and only the second published at this level of specificity. Analysis of the SCR-9 assemblage shows there were no changes in prey choice or handling in this part of the California central coast during the site’s occupation, while the presence of northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) suggests the site’s inhabitants were connected to fur seal hunting at Ano Nuevo Point. Notably, there is evidence for intensive exploitation of cervid bone nutrients, a pattern that may be typical of inland sites in this region.
Author(s): Hittman, Michael | Abstract: This paper recounts some of the extraordinary events associated with the career of Ivan Hanson, a Newe or Shoshone healer from Panamint Valley, California, and a disciple of Northern Arapaho religious innovator, Raymond Harris. As told by Ivan Hanson’s offspring, Gayle Hanson-Johnson, Joann Johnson, and Walter Hanson, these events essentially occurred at Campbell Ranch, a federal reservation in Mason Valley, Nevada, where their father and mother established a chapter of this neo-traditional religion from 1969 –1974.
Author(s): Schwed, Alexander; Garfinkel, Alan P. | Abstract: The Ethnologisches Museum: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (formerly the Museum fur Volkerkunde, and referred to here as the Berlin Ethnological Museum) contains over 1,000 artifacts fashioned by California Indians, collected between 1837 and 1914. The collection is rich and varied; it represents one of the earliest ethnographic collections from Native California and includes ethnological treasures of great aesthetic quality and rarity. The collection is an invaluable source of scientific information and cultural renewal. The objects are highly regarded by living descendants of the Native Californians who long ago sold, traded, and exchanged these artifacts with collectors. They are heirlooms reflecting tribal history and culture, and are worthy of remembrance and study. In this paper we offer first-hand observations on a small sample (n =10) of the Berlin Ethnological Museum’s California Indian collection, with a particular emphasis on baskets. We describe and discuss these objects in detail in order to bring to life the people and cultures that brilliantly produced such exquisite, artistic objects and ethnographic treasures. We also attempt to identify their historical context and the circumstances motivating their collection, so as to better understand how they came to be curated in Berlin. Finally, we provide a brief overview of the history and development of the Berlin Ethnological Museum’s California Indian collection, because the intriguing interconnections and influential coincidences associated with it provide insights into the history and nature of the early development of California Indian studies and particularly illuminate the evolution of the science of anthropology as an academic discipline in America.
Author(s): Connolly, Thomas J.; Jew, Nicholas P.; Swisher, Mark E.; Cannon, William J.; Sullivan, Kelsey J.; Waller, Michel | Abstract: Rattlesnake Cave is located on the western shore of Lake Abert in the northern Great Basin of southeast Oregon, one of hundreds of archaeological sites in the Lake Abert/Chewaucan Basin. The site was dug by collectors in the 1950s, and recovered materials were donated to the Fort Rock Valley Historical Society and Homestead Museum in the early 1990s. We analyze 77 artifacts in the assemblage, which includes cordage, basketry, moccasins, as well as wood, bone, and stone tools. We report new radiocarbon (14C) dates for the site, and the results of energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) on one basalt and nine obsidian bifaces, matching their chemical signatures to regional geologic sources. We discuss the place of Rattlesnake Cave in the broader context of the northern Great Basin while demonstrating how museum collections may contribute to addressing anthropological research questions.
Author(s): Santy, Jenna | Abstract: Ancient starch research is a burgeoning field in archaeology, and is growing in popularity in California. This study looks at starch granules extracted from groundstone tools found at CA-SBA-53, a large middle Holocene site on the Goleta Slough. The middle Holocene is one of the least understood time periods in the Santa Barbara Channel region; little in particular is known about subsistence practices, and even less about plant usage. Understanding subsistence can shed light on other questions relating to settlement patterns, seasonality, and even social organization during this period. This study’s findings suggest that acorns were part of the middle Holocene diet 5,500 years ago, and made up 15% of the starch assemblage. However, more research is needed to contextualize these findings, both in relationship to other taxa consumed, and to other time periods in prehistory.
Author(s): Blackburn, Thomas C. | Abstract: In 1877, Stephen Powers wrote an extended passage on the topic of money and wealth among Native Californians, and illustrated it by itemizing the treasured possessions of a specific Nisenan chief’s family. His account was originally accompanied by four woodcuts based on photographs created in 1874 by Alexander Chase; those photographs are reproduced here, and compared with several additional images from the 1850s to suggest other possible social ramifications of some of the ‘wealth’ items on Powers’ list.
Author(s): Kerns, Virginia | Abstract: I never met Julian Steward, but over a span of many years I did come to know him through his own words and through the personal memories of other people. He died in Urbana, Illinois, in 1972, at the age of seventy, just months before I entered the doctoral program in anthropology at the University of Illinois. During the next few years I encountered faculty members and a student or two who had met him—but very few who had known him. He had spent his last ten years living a reclusive life, avoiding the university and only rarely meeting with students at his house. His position as a research professor, without routine teaching duties, allowed that self-chosen isolation even before he retired. So did the help of his wife—but more on that below.
Author(s): Fowler, Catherine S. | Abstract: Isabel Truesdell Kelly (1906–1982) was an indefatigable field worker, often in rigorous situations that would challenge even the most seasoned outdoors person with all of the modern gear of today. She worked in the western United States, many rugged areas of Mexico, and also in Central and South America, as well as Pakistan. Archaeology was her “ rst love,” although she did major ethnographic studies and made many contributions to applied anthropology. Theory was not her strong interest, but deep description was, in whatever she was pursuing. Her employment career was outside of academe, owing in part to the period in which she took her graduate training (late 1920s-early 1930s), as well as to circumstances that led her in her early years to spend most of her life in Mexico. But she remains a seminal gure in anthropology, as a pioneer in several geographic areas (including the Great Basin), and—in spite of what was then a non-traditional career path—as a role model for women.
Author(s): Popper, Virginia S. | Abstract: Archaeological and historical data on coastal California foodways illustrate the complex interaction between Native Americans and Spanish colonists during the Mission period and re ect adaptations by both groups to new environmental, economic, and social settings. Paleoethnobotanical remains from neophyte (converted Native American) contexts at Mission San Luis Obispo, Mission Vieja de la Purisima, and Mission Santa Cruz and from Spanish contexts at Mission Vieja de la Purisima and the Presidio of San Francisco provide evidence of both continuity and change in aboriginal/ neophyte diets, with little adoption of native foodstuffs by the colonists.
Author(s): Gill, Kristina M.; Hoppa, Kristin M. | Abstract: We synthesize northern Channel Islands archaeobotanical data to discuss broad, diachronic patterns in ancient plant use. Using quantitative and qualitative comparisons, we explore the relative importance of plant foods through time and consider how plant food rankings on the islands may have differed from those on the mainland.We argue that geophytes were the highest ranked plant food resource, valued for their contribution of easily procured carbohydrates in an island environment rich in marine protein and fat resources. Geophytes are phenomenally abundant on the islands, and were used consistently by the Island Chumash and their ancestors for at least 10,000 years with no signi cant change through time. We also explore the representation of various other plant foods through time and consider what archaeobotanical data indicate about the use of groundstone, division of labor, and island-mainland exchange networks.
Author(s): Simms, Steven R. | Abstract: In this issue, we step back far enough in time to outstrip living memory, but do so to symbolize a period when Great Basin anthropology took the form that would make the region internationally known for both ethnographic richness and for theoretical contributions to ethnology. The works of Isabel T. Kelly and Julian H. Steward are known to all who work in the region, and here we remember them as examples of an earlier time in Great Basin anthropology. We have the good fortune to have contributions by two scholars with deep insights into Kelly and Steward gained from personal connections, from reading their correspondence, from interviews, and from intimacy with their scholarly works. Catherine S. Fowler has explored elements of Kelly’s biography before (Fowler 2012; Fowler and Van Kemper 2008), and is perhaps the scholar most familiar with Kelly’s original works, since she is in the nal stages of publishing Kelly’s Southern Paiute ethnographic notes for the Las Vegas area (Fowler and Garey-Sage 2016). Virginia Kerns has written two outstanding books that show different views of Steward, based on his notes, interviews with those who knew him, and the perspectives of the indigenous people he interviewed (Kerns 2003, 2010).
Author(s): Thakar, H. B. | Abstract: In recent years, paleoethnobotanical research on the Northern Channel Islands of California has challenged long-held assumptions regarding the nature of aboriginal patterns of plant exploitation and helped re ne our understanding of prehistoric Chumash subsistence economies. Yet little effort has been made to systematically integrate paleoethnobotanical analyses and datasets with normative subsistence studies, which tend to focus on the abundant (and highly visible) shell sh remains that dominate archaeological assemblages on the Northern Channel Islands. I contend that understanding how the Island Chumash moved about and exploited prehistoric landscapes requires analysis of all subsistence remains—marine and terrestrial, faunal and oral—from multiple sites, site types, and stratigraphic contexts. In this article, I integrate chronological control on century and seasonal timescales with the analysis of well- preserved macrobotanical and faunal assemblages from multiple locations on Santa Cruz Island. These data reveal that variation over relatively short temporal and spatial scales structured foraging decisions and produced persistent and identi able patterns in the archaeological record. In this analysis, reconstruction of seasonal and spatial variation in quantity and array of primary plant and animal food resources exploited contributes to effective assessment of land use and mobility.
