Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

Archaeological investigations at Mission San JosÈ in Fremont, California, have revealed large areas of the mission landscape, including portions of two adobe dwellings in the missionís Native American neighborhood. Preliminary synthesis of previous and ongoing research at Mission San JosÈ focuses on the implications of archaeological evidence for understanding the persistence of indigenous cultural practices under missionization. Materials considered include flaked stone artifacts, shell and glass beads, modified ceramic disks, and faunal and floral remains. Our findings suggest that native people rearticulated various practices within the mission, but did so in ways that were consistent with existing traditions and cultural knowledge.

Recent archaeological investigations near Mission San Luis Obispo encountered a zanja (irrigation ditch) and associated terracing within the larger mission landscape. Native Californian practices persisted through the mission period?incorporating new technologies and new food sources?and using those new technologies to build upon existing social structures. In the process, native groups and individuals actively controlled some of the land use within the mission setting, as well as the products of that land use. Previous investigations of this and other California missions acknowledge the importance of native labor, but typically frame discussion of the infrastructure as part of the larger colonial institution. Recent findings have prompted the authors to reconsider water and infrastructure as part of the native landscape within the mission system at San Luis Obispo.

Native Californians collected and consumed wild plants and animals even as they encountered colonial programs. Persistent interaction with native plant and animal communities can usually be inferred from colonial documents or by their presence as archaeological remains collected at missions, ranchos, or other colonial sites. Growing interest in the archaeology of spaces beyond the walls of colonial sites encourages expanded perspectives on indigenous foodways and the natural environments that may have supported resilient traditions, even as both transformed. In this article, we assess the persistence of indigenous foodways at CA-MRN-202, the site of a mid-nineteenth century trading post on Toms Point in western Marin County. Analysis of zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical assemblages suggests native people continued to collect and consume wild foods. They also selectively incorporated new foods and new technologies, we argue, to maintain connections to meaningful places.

In the White Mountains of California, a shift in the use of the alpine zone from logistical (Previllage) to residential (Village) occupation circa 1,350 B.P. is evident in the appearance of structures, dense midden sites, and an increase in diet breadth. This change in settlement-subsistence should also be apparent in the representation of skeletal parts of artiodactyls exploited in the alpine zone. Since central-place foragers minimize the costs of transporting large game by increasing field processing in order to reduce transport weight, the logistical use of the alpine zone should be marked by high levels of selective transportation of artiodactyl body parts, while minimal selective transportation to alpine residential bases is expected after c. 1,350 B.P. These predictions are tested through a comprehensive analysis of the skeletal part representation and taphonomy of the faunal assemblages from a suite of White Mountains archaeological sites. Differences in skeletal part representation between Previllage and Village assemblages generally reinforce expectations derived from the central-place foraging model, with some important deviations worth further investigation.

Energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) analysis of geological obsidian samples from three localities in the southern Birch Creek drainage revealed that the vast majority of nodules represent the Walcott Tuff, a widespread toolstone-caliber volcanic glass in eastern Idaho. XRF data generated from analysis of over 500 obsidian artifacts from four archaeological sites in the Birch Creek Valley document the reliance of prehistoric peoples on Walcott Tuff obsidian. Data from newly documented Walcott Tuff exposures lead us to conclude that people who frequented the Birch Creek Valley could have acquired obsidian from proximate Walcott Tuff exposures without having to travel over 100 km. south to the American Falls area. These results underscore the importance of documenting, and geochemically analyzing, locations of artifact-quality ash-flow tuff obsidians prior to advancing archaeological conclusions about obsidian conveyance and population mobility.

John Fitchís (1972) report on CA-SLO-2 is perhaps the single most iconic study of fish remains in California. The site was excavated by Roberta Greenwood in 1968, and Fitch devoted over 900 hours to the analysis of (mostly) otoliths from a single column sample, leaving non-otoliths from the column and other remains from the rest of Greenwoodís excavations unexamined. For this study, we analyzed the previously unidentified remains (consisting primarily of vertebrae) and compared the results with those from Fitchís otolith study and Greenwoodís 6 mm. excavation units. Not surprisingly, we found additional and smaller fishes in the micromesh samples. Since Fitchís report is the only one in California that we are aware of that has identified remains of the wolf-eel (Anarrhichthys ocellatus), we sought to determine if the identification of this species was credible. We conclude that prickleback (Xiphister sp.) teeth were misidentified as wolf-eel, and consequently that wolf-eel has yet to be documented as a fish used by Native Californians. This is consistent with the general lack of evidence for the exploitation of large and/or pelagic fishes along the central California coast. Furthermore, all three samples suggest that rockfishes (Sebastes spp.) and northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax) were consistently important to the Diablo Cove fishers. Other small schooling fishes, including herrings (Clupeidae), night smelt (Spirinchus starksi), and New World silversides (Atherinopsidae), were important as well, but comparisons between methods and the use of micromesh samples do not necessarily indicate the relative importance of small versus large fish. Diachronic comparisons from all three samples indicate that fishing increased during the Middle Period. Two of the three data sets suggest that fishing then declined at Diablo Canyon during the Late Period.

An experiment reported by Cook et al. (2017) demonstrated that there was a strong morphological similarity between a stone used to crack open California sea mussels and archaeological pitted stones. Based on these findings, the authors concluded that the primary function of pitted stones was to process mussels. The use of pitted stones to crack open turban snails was also suspected but was not evaluated experimentally. Here we report the results of an experiment in which we processed 572 turban snails using two flat, fist-sized cobbles, one as a hammer and the other as an anvil. As in the Cook et al. (2017) study, we found that cracking open these mollusks also produced a pitted morphology on the anvil stone virtually identical to that of archaeological pitted stones. From this, we conclude that pitted stones were almost certainly used to crack open turban snails as well as mussels along the central coast of California.