North America - California (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (318 Records)
The fence is integral to the mythology of the American West, particularly the barb wire fence, such as in the battle between cattle and sheep raisers and between pastoralists and agriculturalists. The years of the open range were short lived in comparison to the decades of fence construction and maintenance. Serving as boundaries and divisions of landscape, fence lines can give valuable insight into how peoples shaped their landscapes in the past and continue to shape it in the present. Although...
The Incised Stones of CA-ORA-662, Pelican Hill in Orange County, CA (2016)
A large scale data recovery investigation took place in the early 1990s at CA-ORA-662, Pelican Hill in Orange County, CA. The excavation revealed an array of Late Prehistoric artifact types including 124 incised stones, grooved stones and tablets. Among these are 41 stones incised with distinctive patterns, the majority of which have a simple cross hatch or diamond pattern. Three of the stones have more complex designs suggesting a non-utilitarian use. The collection of artifacts recovered...
Indian Family Housing at Mission San Juan Bautista: Archaeology and Ethnohistory (2016)
Although the Indian converts resident at Mission San Juan Bautista numbered as high as 1248 (in 1823), the available adobe housing for families could only accommodate perhaps a fifth of this number. Archaeological testing on the Indian family housing site for this mission was combined with Spanish sacramental records, annual reports, and other documents to suggest individuals and their families most likely to have been allotted this scarce housing. The aim of this study is to attempt to bring...
Indifference, Inertia, Limited Budgets, and Preservation: Insights from Site Stewardship Programs (2015)
Archaeological sites are fragile and non-renewable, but how do we protect them from visitors, development projects, and natural processes that are accelerated by climate change? People are interested in reports of new archaeological discoveries, but they don’t know -- or care -- about local archaeological resources, and publicizing them is restricted by confidentiality requirements. Government agencies are charged with protecting archaeological resources, but they do not have enough resources to...
INNOVATION EQUALS GREAT PARTNERS (2016)
As Heritage Program Leader for the Pacific Southwest Region which includes California, Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa, I have had to come up with innovative approaches to increase capacity for the Heritage Program on each of the 18 National Forests within Region 5. This has been particularly challenging over the past couple of years as most of California seems to be burning up and Heritage staff are stretched thinly across the state responding to fire emergencies and other Agency priorities....
Innovative Applications of Archaeological Perspectives: An Analysis of Home Front Material Culture within the Context of Individual vs. Municipal Investments in Oakland, CA (2015)
Through the growth and development of satellite imagery and panoramic street photography championed by Google Earth, a mass archive of accessible imagery has been created documenting intimate material worlds frozen in space and time. Utilizing these newly available forms of public data, our team (built of one historical archaeologist, one GIS technician, and one statistician) conducted a virtual pedestrian survey of 1000 randomly selected home fronts in Oakland, California, implementing a...
Intensive Use of Wild Chenopodium by Central California Hunter Gatherers (2017)
Three decades of California paleoethnobotany have shown that Chenopodium is the most common small seed found in central California archaeological sites. Chenopodium is concentrated in sedentary residential communities in lowland areas, where historical population densities rivaled or exceeded those found elsewhere in the world. The most intensive use known for Chenopodium is from wetland areas of the Sacramento and Santa Clara valleys. Despite thousands of years as the pre-eminent small-seeded...
Interactions and Social Change in California: A Perspective from the Far West (2017)
People in California have interacted with groups near and far for thousands of years. Here we take a big picture approach by looking at how interactions between people across time and space affect the histories of adjunct regions. In this paper, we first establish connections between people in California to the Northwest, Southwest, Mexico, and afar to demonstrate the scale of meaningful interactions. Second, by considering wide-ranging and long-term interactions, we better explain the agency...
Introducing the Cache Cave Archaeological Project: Background, Aims, and Methods (2015)
Caching in caves and rockshelters has been documented in many parts of the Chumash region and beyond, but the discovery and excavation of this Cache Cave provides one of the first opportunities to document cached items in context, assess formation processes, and interpret a site of this kind with preservation of perishable artifacts, as well as materials that are potentially associated with their manufacture and maintenance. This paper introduces the Cache Cave site, situates this site among...
Investigating Drivers of Technological Richness among Contact-Period Western North American Farmers (2015)
Building on several previous studies we investigate the factors that influence technological richness in nonindustrial farming groups. A number of studies have shown that the factors that influence technological richness and complexity in hunter-gatherer groups differ from the factors that influence farming populations. Specifically, environmental risk is the primary driver in hunter-gatherer technological richness and complexity, whereas population size seems to be the main driver for farmers....
Investigating Genetic Structure and Dietary Ecology through Ancient DNA and Stable Isotopic Analysis of Prehistoric Dogs from San Nicolas Island, California (2015)
The study of prehistoric dogs has become a global trend. Not only did they fulfill a variety of roles and were an important part of past human societies, but they can be used to understand human-modified environments and human movement. On the California Channel Islands the domestic dog has been shown to be a significant component of the archaeological record. Dogs are uncovered in a variety of cultural contexts and their presence on the islands dates to the middle Holocene. Despite their...
Irish Independence in the Crapper? Irish Republican Army Buttons in San Francisco (2017)
This paper examines two Irish Rublician Army buttons discovered in a privy associated with a late 19th century household in San Francisco in order to elucidate how Irish immigrants became Irish Americans on the West Coast. Archaeologits and historians have studied the Irish Diaspora, this they have largely focused on the Northeast. While the Irish Republican Army is familiar to contemporary audiences, many people are unaware of the organization’s 19th century roots in the United States. The...
Is There Strength in Numbers? An Evaluation of the Complementary Roles of Archaeologists and Anthropologists in Forensic Contexts (2017)
This paper explores the training and education that forensic anthropologists and forensic archaeologists have traditionally received, and how it is put into practice in forensic contexts. The substantial differences in theory, method, and practice between the two sub-disciplines will be summarized and how these differences shape what each can contribute in the field will be discussed. This paper will argue that although some overlap between the two sub-disciplines exists, contemporary...
Issues involved in the recording and protection of a previously unknown rock art site in Northern California (2015)
This paper will discuss the interaction between an archaeologist, a Native American who is a most likely descendent from the archaeological site, and a municipal government agency in the rediscovery, documentation and eventual repatriation of indigenous knowledge of a previously unrecorded rock art site. The rock is located in Northern California, on the lake bottom of a municipal water district water property. How should the rock be recorded? Does anyone really "own" that information? Who...
It Takes a Village to Curate Burro Flats (2015)
Nestled in the hills of Simi Valley at what is known as the "old" Rocketdyne site and where NASA conducted testing for the Airspace program, is the sacred site of Burro Flats. Considered to be a ceremonial site with evidence of astronomical alignments, Burro Flats carries important meaning for some of the tribes of Southern California, primarily the Chumash and other local communities such as the Fernandeno and the Gabrielino/Tongva. Mainly known for its’ painted cave drawings associated with...
It Takes a Village: Mainland and Channel Islands Population (Labor) Resources through Time (2015)
This presentation traces population estimates of the Chumash peoples on both sides of the Santa Barbara Channel through several thousand years, examining how researchers have arrived at those estimates and where possible suggesting how we might need to adjust both some of our assumptions and some of the outcomes. This review should be useful in further examining other phenomena such as sizes of labor forces available for the intensive Channel Islands specialized craft production industries...
Jaunt VR 360 stereo video Virtual Reality camera as a tool for historic interpretation and archaeological documentation (2017)
Presentation of an immersive, virtual reality experience of 19th century Santa Catalina Island/Pimu that features a digital model of historic structures and virtual reality stagecoach ride across the island as an exploration of the interpretive and documentation possibilities of the Jaunt VR camera.
The Kashaya Pomo Cultural Landscape Project: A Community-Based Approach (2015)
In order to more effectively co-steward Kashaya Pomo cultural resources, the California Department of Transportation and the Kashaya Pomo Tribe conducted a multi-year community-based cultural landscape study. This study documents that for some as yet immeasurable time back into antiquity, the lives of Kashaya ancestors were structured by a landscape that included burn-managed ecosystem components, clearings for villages and other Kashaya places, trails, and boundaries. Their accumulated bank of...
Kneeling difficulty and osteoarthritis: what data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative can tell us about prehistoric Californians (2015)
An essential part of California hunter-gatherer diet was ground foods, such as acorns. Grinding food with the use of mortars and pestles likely required extensive kneeling. Most of the food grinding among prehistoric Californians was likely accomplished by females. In Ryan’s Mound (CA-Ala-329; N = 284), for instance, 33% of females were buried with mortars or pestles whereas 14% of males were buried with mortars or pestles (Chi-square = 10.48, P < 0.001). A rich literature on kneeling effects on...
Kroeber’s omnivore’s dilemma: regional perspectives on late Holocene human paleodiets in the San Francisco Bay area (2015)
The analysis of ancient hunter-gatherer diet in the San Francisco Bay Area has been the subject of enormous research effort over the past century. Hundreds of "shell mounds" that once dotted the landscape around the bayshore provide evidence for significant population growth during the Late Holocene. Resource intensification models link population increase to a shift away from exploitation of low-cost, high-ranked prey toward greater use of high-cost, low-ranked prey at a number of...
LA PINTURA RUPESTRE EN LOS SITIOS ARQUEOLÓGICOS DE LA SIERRA DE LA GIGANTA, BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR (2015)
Uno de los objetivos del proyecto Arqueológico Sierra de la Giganta, es localizar y registrar la gran variedad de sitios arqueológicos en la sierra que lleva el mismo nombre. Dentro de la clasificación de los sitios arqueológicos, encontramos campamentos tanto al aire libre como en cuevas, concheros y sitios con arte rupestre, dentro de los que se incluyen los petroglifos y los sitios con pintura rupestre. En estos últimos sitios, pondremos particular interés en esta presentación, en donde...
Land Snails and Archaeology on the California Channel Islands (2017)
Land snails have the potential to address a variety of archaeological concerns, including the identification of paleolandscapes and paleoclimatic conditions. Such studies demonstrate how non-marine mollusks can be employed to infer changes such as seasonal and long-term precipitation rates and anthropogenic landscape alterations. Although land snails are abundant in Channel Island sites, they are often ignored. In this paper, we utilize land snail remains from three archaeological sites on San...
A Land Transformed: Holocene Sea-Level Rise, Landscape Evolution, and Human Occupation in the San Francisco Bay Area (2015)
The effects of landscape evolution on the archaeological record of the San Francisco Bay Area have been profound, primarily due to rising sea levels. These changes are illustrated through a trans-Holocene "tour" of the bay that incorporates the landscape context of many sites featured in subsequent papers. For the regions first inhabitants this area was a vast inland valley, rather than the state’s largest estuary. The Holocene transgression is illustrated utilizing a new sea-level curve...
Late Holocene dietary variation along the central California coast: Isotopic evidence for marine dependence (2015)
Reconstructing dietary variation among earlier human populations remains a major goal of archaeological research. Along the central California coast, archaeological reconstructions of hunter-gatherer subsistence have primarily focused on data gleaned from archaeofaunal remains and lithic assemblages. In this study, we examine paleodiets in Late Holocene (ca. 3430-660 B.P.) humans and fauna from the Monterey Bay area of the California coast. Using stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes of...
Late Holocene occupation in southern California using data derived from Cultural Resource Management studies on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, San Diego County, California (2015)
This paper explores aspects of the archaeology of coastal California. Drawing on a large body of data collected during cultural resource management studies on Camp Pendleton in northern San Diego County. The period of broad focus is the Late Holocene. Since chronological issues are central to this study, only radiocarbon dated sites are described while exploring the wider landscape, and changes it its use, and occupation. Landscape factors considered include chronology, topographic setting,...