In their quest for visions and for supernatural power, the Chumash of the Santa Barbara region were one of many tribes throughout North and South America that resorted to the use of hallucinogenic plants. Datura was one of the most widely known of these hallucinogens; Indians of an area from Chile to the American Southwest made ritual use of several species of Datura. Until recently, references to Datura in the literature on the Chumash have been brief and largely conjectural. Now contemporary workers are synthesizing the unpublished manuscripts of John P. Harrington's ethnographic work among the Chumash between 1912 and 1922. In particular, Thomas Blackburn (1974) has done a cultural analysis of Chumash narrative texts in which Datura figures prominently.

In this paper, I discuss the pattern of Chumash placenaming. Places are named for prominent geographical features and their fancied resemblances, for flora, fauna, and local conditions, and for legendary and mythological incidents. I give priority to those placenames still surviving, of course, but the names of many places long since forgotten appear here too. It is not, however, my purpose to make an exhaustive list of placenames, nor to locate them precisely.