Palimpsests in the Colonial Borderland at Black Star Canyon, Orange County, California.

Summary

The Santa Ana mountain landscape of contemporary Orange County, CA has been dichotomously characterized as “a wild colonial borderland” and “a prehistoric indigenous space” where the material and social histories of indigenous communities are ossified while legacies of Spanish, Mexican and American colonial society are both solidified and continued. Within this landscape, the Black Star Canyon village (CA-ORA-132) objectifies this historical disjunction in that the site constitutes a multi-component prehistoric/historic period site that was associated with the local history of the “Battle of Black Star Canyon”, in which recalcitrant Indians were accused of stealing horses and were subsequently killed in 1831 by American fur trappers. This paper seeks to complicate the disunion the modern characterizations of the archaeological landscape highlighted above by exploring how prehistoric and colonial era materialities of the mountain contributed to local and non-local indigenous practices of social and economic subversion in conjunction with the formulation of citizenship and violence through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Why Social Archaeology Matters

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