Contemporary Issues in California Archaeology

Terry L Jones, Jennifer E Perry, Terry L Jones, Jennifer E Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611320916
• eBook ISBN: 9781315431635
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent archaeological research on California includes a greater diversity of models and approaches to the region's past, as older literature on the subject struggles to stay relevant. This comprehensive volume offers an in-depth look at the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in the field including key controversies relevant to the Golden State: coastal colonization, impacts of comets and drought cycles, systems of power, Polynesian contacts, and the role of indigenous peoples in the research process, among others. With a specific emphasis on those aspects of California's past that resonate with the state's modern cultural identity, the editors and contributors—all leading figures in California archaeology—seek a new understanding of the myth and mystique of the Golden State.

Part I Origins, Environment, and Ecology

1 The Archaeology of a Goodly Ilande

Terry L. Jones and Jennifer E. Perry

DOI: 10.4324/9781315431659-1

In about the year 1500, Spanish author Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo wrote of a mythical “island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise … peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.” De Montalvo penned this famous description in a Spanish novel having never laid eyes on the land that would ultimately become California. Later that century, however, British privateer Sir Francis Drake offered a fantastic first-hand portrayal of “a goodly country, and fruitful soil, stored with many blessings fit for the use of man.” Mixing fact and imagination, such accounts established by the beginning of the seventeenth century the enduring myth of California as a profoundly unique place with distinctive attributes of isolation, natural bounty, gender, and race. In this book we perpetuate the longstanding tradition of portraying California as a metaphorical island where the human experience has always been unique.

Our goal is not to perpetuate the fantastic dimensions of the California myth, but rather to explore aspects of the California mystique represented in the archaeological record of its prehistoric and early historic societies. Our primary goal is to summarize state-of-the art understandings of California’s past, focusing specifically on topics that resonate with and reflect aspects of California that have contributed to its modern-day cultural identity. In short, our goal has been an archaeological anthropology of sorts. With the establishment of the “New Archaeology” in the 1970s, it became fashionable to envision the mission of the discipline as “anthropological archaeology,” which sought to investigate broader aspects of the human condition than had been considered before. Although the promise of anthropological archaeology seemed almost limitless, it was defined narrowly in opposition to the cultural historical paradigm that preceded it, and “anthropological archaeologists” focused on those aspects of the record and theoretical and methodological approaches that cultural historians were not. As such, there was a heavy emphasis on cultural ecology, environment, settlement, and subsistence. Certainly much of what makes California unique is indeed related to its physical setting, and in the first half on this book we consider aspects of California’s environment that have contributed in serious ways to its reputation/myth as a unique cultural island in today’s world. While we are not espousing some form of neoenvironmental determinism, we do suggest that it is possible to see certain influences of environment as having deeper roots in California’s past than many assume. Is it possible that the California experience existed before the myth of California was created? Our goal in this book is to evaluate that question.

It is also possible to pick apart the myth of California into a series of cultural, social, and political traits that are worth considering in reference to the state’s prehistory and early history. Our objective for these themes is not necessarily to relate them to California’s physical setting, but rather to simply point out that California had such things as art, violence, tourists, powerful leaders, multiple genders, and ethnic diversity before the arrival of Euro-Americans and that archaeologists are increasingly investigating these dimensions of the state’s past. It should go without saying that a true archaeological anthropology needs to consider all such aspects of the human experience—even if some are more difficult to study in the material record than others.

One of the major obstacles to development of a true archaeological anthropology in California has been the lingering influence of cultural evolutionary and adaptation-based theories. As useful as these concepts have been for explaining some of the variability in California’s archaeological record, there also has been a tendency for them in some cases to become self-fulfilling prophecies in which California’s past is inevitably viewed a progression from simple to complex in all areas of the human experience, including technology, social organization, artistic accomplishment, and political structure. These concepts were especially well suited to the highly incomplete archaeological record that was available in the 1970s when such theories were most prevalent. With so little known, for example, about the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in California it was relatively easy if not almost mandatory to envision gradual changes from simplicity to complexity over the course of the Holocene. As a greater fraction of this record has been revealed in the last few decades, it has become increasingly apparent that California’s past was more complicated than these simple, unilinear interpretive models suggested.

Of course, cultural evolutionary perspectives also posit a fundamentally critical distinction between prehistoric societies and those that occupy California today: hunting and gathering versus industrialized agricultural economies. Certainly there is no denying the technological

and demographic gulf that separates these modes of subsistence. Still, emphasizing the economic differences between prehistoric and modern California brings with it a tendency to forget that California’s earliest inhabitants were biologically modern, intelligent human beings with sophisticated technologies and complex cultures. Even if the approach to these societies is limited to archaeology, they deserve full anthropological investigation. Ignoring the technological distinction between prehistoric and modern Californians allows us to consider possible similarities in the European and pre-European California experience.

But such an approach should not overlook or underestimate the profound changes that accompanied the official creation of the myth of California and the transition from a land occupied by perhaps 300,000 Native American people to one of 37 million, few of whom are indigenous. This transition took place in a mere 250 years and brought with it massive environmental and cultural changes, including the imposition of a structure of extreme social inequality. While it is possible to also see change and inequality deep in California’s past—change could perhaps be the most enduring of all traits of the California experience—it would be foolish to overlook or deny the magnitude of social and demographic changes associated with the recent past. Unlike pre-contact cultural changes, these most recent developments are partially documented in historic and salvage ethnographic records, but archaeology also has much to offer on these subjects in light of the fact that so few of the state’s people are well represented in the earliest texts. For these reasons we highlight archaeological research on these social dimensions of the more recent past in the second half of this book.

Part I: Origins, Environment, and Ecology

Aspects of California’s biology and physical setting that seem to have the greatest potential to influence human lives include its position on the shore of the northeastern Pacific Ocean (Figure 1.1), its relative environmental richness, and its volatility. As Erlandson points out in Chapter 2, California’s coastal setting renders it approachable from both the sea and the land, and it now seems that people arrived via both routes from the very beginning. This tradition of both land- and sea-based exploration and settlement, perpetuated in historic times, has tended to encourage the emergence of ethnic and biological diversity among the resulting human populations. The genetic and linguistic patterns described by Johnson et al. in Chapter 4 are partially a product of the geographic position of California and its repeated “discovery” by distinct groups who arrived from different directions at different times— some by sea. California’s early coastal archaeology is also an important testament to the intelligence and technological capabilities of its earliest peoples: terminal Pleistocene finds from the Channel Islands indicate the use of reliable watercraft and other maritime technologies that previous generation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• I Origins, Environment, and Ecology
• II Social Dimensions of the Past
• Index
• List of Contributors