North America - California (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (318 Records)
This paper considers both macrobotanical and starch grain evidence for terrestrial plant use at Diablo Valdez (SCRI-619/620) on Santa Cruz Island, California. This inland site consists of a rock shelter as well as an open-air living space, and was occupied from ca. 5900 years ago and into the Historic period. Macrobotanical remains were recovered from 140 liters of soil, while starch grain analysis was conducted on six bowl fragments. This paper contextualizes these results within a broader...
Plants, Animals, and Food Choice Within the Market Street Chinatown, San Jose, California (2015)
The Market Street Chinatown was a major urban Chinese community in nineteenth century San Jose, California. From 1866 to 1887, the community housed and served as a home base to several thousand Chinese residents and laborers. Excavated in the 1980s, the Market Street Chinatown yielded an incredibly rich collection of material culture as well as faunal and floral remains. This paper examines food consumption and food choice amongst Market Street's nineteenth century Chinese residents. The author...
The Potential Influence of Fish and Obsidian Resources on Shasta Cultural Complexity (2015)
The geology of Shasta Valley, California provides an extremely rich food resource for fish and shellfish, which produces abundant fish resources in the Shasta River and its tributaries, well documented by fishery biologists and historical records. The geographical location of the valley and the Upper Klamath River allows relatively easy access to high quality obsidian sources to the east, providing a valuable item for trade to the west. Consideration of the geology and geography allows for a...
Poverty, Motherhood, and Childhood in 19th-Century San Francisco (2015)
Popular images of the maritime industry in places like San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Cove often focus on men — whether working on docks or ships, or on land at iron works and carpenter’s shops. Less visible in the historical record of these spaces are the women and children also living, and often working, along the waterfront. Historical research on the neighborhood that bordered Yerba Buena Cove in the late-19th-century suggests that most residences were occupied by families, rather than by...
Power and Nature: A Contemporary Archaeology of Yosemite National Park (2015)
Parks are the creation of established power structures, and are themselves statements about power over nature. Visitors to these parks, however, negotiate these structures in their own ways. Often, historical archaeological analysis focuses on power struggles: domination and resistance between classes, races, genders, etc. This paper analyzes how some of the tools of these more traditional archaeological analyses apply to the present. A contemporary archaeology of litter in Yosemite has explored...
Predicting the Past: GIS Weighted Modeling on the Carrizo Plain National Monument (2015)
The Carrizo Plain National Monument contains some of the most significant heritage resources in North America. Appropriate management is critical to the preservation of these sensitive resources. The results of GIS modeling can be directly applied toward a wide variety of historic preservation approaches. This presentation will describe the development of a site location predictive model for the CPNM and its direct application to resource management. The model identifies areas where culturally...
Prehistoric Cooking with Rock and Rock Substitutes in the Sacramento Valley, California (2017)
When populations increase, more resources need to be extracted from the land to satisfy their needs. When cooking, one way to increase yields is to change techniques to include rock heating elements. To test this, twenty sites from the Late Archaic Period (3,000 to 150 BP) in the northern Sacramento Valley of California were examined. The results of the study indicated that there is an increase in rock heating elements and thermally altered rock in archaeological deposits through time. It was...
: Prehistoric Settlement Patterns of the Los Alamitos Bay, Southern California (2017)
The details of prehistoric settlement patterns in the Alamitos Bay area of southern California are not well documented. Due to rapid urban develop throughout the 20th century, the archaeological record has been explored with only limited excavations. The lack of systematic investigations have limited our knowledge about prehistoric populations and their variability in terms of subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Using a review of information gleaned from archaeological studies...
Prehistoric Subsistence and Settlement Patterns in the Los Alamitos Bay Region of Southern California (2016)
The prehistoric population of the Los Alamitos Bay area made significant use of local shell fish resources. Using records of shellfish species found in shell middens, information about habitats for shell fish species, sea level records for the Holocene and a detailed topographic model of the region, one can examine how prehistoric use of the landscape changed as a function of the post-Pleistocene environment.
Preliminary Insights from the Cache Cave Textile Assemblage (2015)
Much of what is known about the pre-contact textile industries of interior Chumash peoples derives from early archaeological investigations and nonprofessional collections acquired from caves and rockshelters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vast majority of this material is undated, poorly provenienced, and underreported, which makes interpreting such artifacts’ technological stylistic variability and significance difficult. Recent recovery of more than 500...
The Problem of Geographic Circumscription, Population Aggregation, and Ideal Free Distribution on Isla Cedros, Baja California, Mexico (2016)
In the last half-century, studies using human behavioral ecology (HBE) have made significant headway in modeling how humans in the past would have adapted to the environmental constraints surrounding them. There has been much less progress in terms of examining the socio-political pressures hunter-gatherers in the past would have felt in their daily lives. Factors driving choices in these models are often based on an underlying assumption of ideal free distribution; however, one is hard-pressed...
Project Archaeology in the Classroom: Aptos Middle School and the Presidio (2015)
What happens when teachers and students engage with project archeology curriculum materials in the classroom ? What happens when students investigate archaeological and historical sites using the process archaeological inquiry? Critical thinking, inquiry, and interdisciplinary investigation are the hall marks of Project Archeology curriculum material. students at Aptos Middle School in San francisco, learned archaeological inquiry in their classroom and applied it to a real archeological site. ...
Protecting Historic Structures during Wildfires (2017)
The increased wildfire activity in Western North America is endangering most if not all historic and prehistoric archaeological sites on American's public lands. This paper looks at how archaeologist can work with fire fighters during these emergencies to protect the most susceptible sites, historic structures and wooden buildings and structures to fire, and how to plan for such event and what steps are needed to best protect these sites during a fire event.
Reassembling Black Star Canyon (2017)
The Santa Ana mountain landscape of contemporary Orange County, California, has been dichotomously characterized as "a wild frontier" and "a tamed indigenous space" where the material and social histories of indigenous communities are downplayed and legacies of Spanish, Mexican and American colonial society are both solidified and continued. Within this landscape, the Black Star Canyon Village site (CA-ORA-132) objectifies this binary historicity as the site constitutes a prehistoric/historic...
Recognizing Indigenous Settlement Patterns: Results from Pimu (Catalina Island, CA) (2017)
For 10 years, the Pimu Catalina Island Archaeology Project (PCIAP) has worked with the Gabrielino (Tongva) community to create a research agenda that acknowledges the Tongva’s cultural knowledge of the environment. Based on an Indigenous archaeology approach, PCIAP’s work recognizes that previous interpretations of Island Tongva settlement patterns do not accurately reflect how the Island Tongva viewed themselves upon the landscape nor their relationships to the people and items around them ...
Reconsidering Stable Isotope Analysis of Bone Collagen for the Interpretation of Prehistoric Breastfeeding and Weaning Practices: A Case Study from Santa Clara Valley, California (2017)
Breastfeeding and weaning practices (BWPs) are deeply personal, influenced by individual choices, circumstances of health and opportunity, community support, and cultural norms. This presentation will discuss the advantages and challenges of using bone collagen composition to interpret breastfeeding and weaning practices, using data from the Yukisma Mound (CA-SCL-38), a Late Period (~740-230 BP) ancestral Ohlone mortuary site in Santa Clara County, California. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope...
Reconsidering the Connections between Ecological Change and Political Change in Colonial California (2017)
California is geographically separated from the rest of North America by high mountain ranges and extensive deserts, but paradoxically the region's Mediterranean climate may have facilitated the imposition of Euroamerican colonial rule in the late 18th century. In particular, many scholars suggest that ecological changes accelerated political changes in the missionized portion of California's coastal strip. There, the rapid spread of invasive plant and animal species had far-reaching effects on...
Reconstructing Mobility in the San Francisco Bay Area: Strontium and Oxygen Isotope Analysis at two California Late Period sites, CA-CCO-297 and CA-SCL-919 (2015)
Stable isotope analysis can reconstruct individual mobility of prehistoric California on a scale that can distinguish movement between different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. This study uses strontium and oxygen isotope analysis to compare individual mobility patterns of two Late Period sites, CA-CCO-297 and CA-SCL-919. Three life stages are used for comparison, including early childhood from first molars, early adolescence from third molars, and adulthood/time of death from bone....
Representing Cultural Networks: A GIS Analysis of Spanish Colonial Settlement in San Diego (2016)
The colonial efforts by the Spanish and subsequent generations resulted in the formation of cultural networks that were based on the reliance and access to key ecological resources. Ultimately these networks influenced the development of social stratification of the San Diego River watershed and the surrounding region. Incorporating the analysis of archaeological, anthropological, and historical data, and utilizing geographic information systems, a series of maps depicting site densities, a...
Return to the West End Site: Zooarchaeological Results from a Tongva Village on Catalina Island (2017)
Native American subsistence practices on the California Channel Islands are characterized by a variety of rich marine sea foods ranging from shellfish to dolphin. Fluctuation in these maritime diets throughout the Holocene has been posited to represent social and ecological phenomena in the ancient past. This poster presents recent zooarchaeological results, as well as the first radiocarbon assays, of a faunal collection that was excavated from the West End Site on Santa Catalina Island in...
Revisiting San Clemente Island’s Radiocarbon History (2017)
SRI recently completed NRHP site evaluations for 20 sites on San Clemente Island, as part of our on-call cultural resource management contract with Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Southwest Division. Radiocarbon dates from 19 of the sites clustered into four discrete occupational episodes, all dating to the Late Holocene (post 3800 B.P.). The episodes were separated from one another by 200 -400 year intervals. Radiocarbon dates from other Late Holocene sites across the island studied by...
The Rights of Construction Design for Ancient Architecture Wah-ho-ga Village Traditional Ceremonial Structure of the Seven Affiliated Tribes of Yosemite (2015)
As the exploration into the political and legal relationships between the United States and Indian Tribes continues into the area of building codes and regulations for non-modern and ancient traditional methods, what transpires here at Wah-ho-ga may have a broad range effect upon traditional structures in other Native American territories all over the nation where traditional ceremonial practices occur. The current building codes based upon far different construction methods and materials cannot...
The Ritual of Return: Mounded Landscapes in Colonial California (2017)
In the United States, prehistoric and historical archaeology subfields are characterized by distinct intellectual histories, methods, and theoretical frameworks that continue to guide where archaeologists apply their craft. For California prehistorians, deeply layered shellmounds long represented ideal sites for chronology building. Until recently, shellmounds were also unlikely places for historical archaeologists to investigate interactions between Native Americans and colonial institutions....
The Role of Portable Rock Art during the Northern California Archaic Period (2017)
One of the largest and oldest portable rock art assemblages identified in North America has been documented in the upper reaches of the Sacramento River in Northern California. This fluorescence of stylistic activity, commencing as early as 6,000 years ago, appears to be a symbolic manifestation of group identity and a harbinger of the rise of social and territorial complexity in this region. In this paper we explore the linguistic, social, and ecological variables that may have given rise to...
Sacrifice, Litter, and Loss: The Archaeology of the Recent Past atop a Sacred Island in the Sky (2015)
Located in the eastern San Francisco Bay area, Mount Diablo (3,848’) rises from an otherwise almost featureless terrain, making it highly visible from much of central California. Because of its visibility, Diablo is a backdrop to ethnographic and contemporary mythologies. The view from the peak is considered one of the most spectacular and unhindered in the world. Easily accessible by vehicle, the summit is visited daily by hundreds of tourists, many whom throw coins and other objects from the...