California (Other Keyword)
1-25 (57 Records)
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data was collected from over 300 individuals to further understand the hypothesized spread of Penutian populations from the Columbian Plateau into Central California around 5,000 BP. While living and ethnographic Ohlone groups- specifically in the San Francisco Bay area- speak Penutian languages, it is unclear what effect immigrating Penutians speakers had on existing Hokan populations between 2500-3000 BP. Distinct maternal lineages that belong to either immigrating...
The antecedents to the specialized microdrill industry on Santa Cruz Island, CA (2015)
I analyze more than 400 lithic artifacts associated with the development of intensive Chumash shell-drilling activities from four sites on Santa Cruz Island (SCRI), CA. By the second millennium CE, the Chumash of the northern Channel Islands had developed a specialized bead-making industry and a parallel industry of formal microdrills to perforate those beads (as documented by Arnold [1987]). During the latter part of the Middle Period (AD 900-1150), trapezoidal microdrills dominated; in the...
Archaeobotanical Evidence and Diachronic Changes in Foodways of Indigenous Groups in the Central Coast and San Francisco Bay Regions, California (2015)
The Central Coast and San Francisco Bay regions of California are areas of high climatic, ecological, and indigenous cultural heterogeneity. During the last two decades, archaeobotanical research in these regions has begun to document the contributions of botanical resources in indigenous foodways systems through time. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a large number of anthropogenic shell mounds were population aggregation sites used for thousands of years, and, for the period after ca. 1050 CE,...
Archaeology Field Survey Reports Contributed by BLM, Arcata, CA Field Office
This project includes Archaeology Field Survey Reports contributed by the Bureau of Land Management's, Arcata, California field office.This initial contribution will establish a regional digital archive project whose goal is to accumulate heritage documents, greatly enhancing our ability to preserve historic resources within the North Coast Region.
The Archaeology of Cowboy Island: The Santa Rosa Historic Archaeology Project (SRHAP) (2016)
This paper presents the findings from the first year of a new historic archaeology research project on Santa Rosa Island, one of the five islands of Channel Islands National Park off the coast of southern California. A new, multi-year project dedicated to recording the extant historic structures and sites related to the 19th- and 20th-century ranching complex was started in 2014, instigated by the recent opening of the Santa Rosa Island Research Station. Since May 2014, four CSU Channel Islands...
Before The War: A Japanese Family in Downtown San Luis Obispo, California (2018)
In 2016 ESA excavated a ceramic- and bottle-filled privy associated with the Kurokawa family. During the first half of the 20th century, the Kurokawas lived in Dowtown San Luis Obispo where they also operated a vegetable store. During this time they retained strong ties with their homeland. In 1942 the family was forced to give up their home and livelyhood and move to a Japanese internment camp. Artifacts from this deposit give a glimpse into their daily life prior to their internment.
Beyond Missions: Documenting Mexican and Mexican-American Adobes in California (2016)
In the foreword to their 1931 review of nineteenth-century adobe houses in California, historical architects Donald Hannaford and Revel Edwards express despair at the state of such research in their time, noting that "printed material on the subject" could only be generated via discovery in the field. Eighty-five years later, research is still lacking. California’s famed colonial missions tend to draw the bulk of archaeological attention while research associated with Mexican- and Gold Rush-era...
Big Picture History in North America: Integrating Narratives of Our Continent’s Past (2017)
No society exists in isolation. In order to understand the history of North America it is therefore critical to see the continent as a landscape of mutually known and interacting places and peoples. One of the goals of this panel is to bring together specialists from different corners of the continent to share narratives of regional interaction in their areas. This paper will introduce the thematic and theoretical groundings for the session, suggesting that both systemic and historical models...
California Historic Military Buildings and Structures Inventory - Report (2000)
This report contains inventories and histories of historic structures on military installations in California.
California Public Education and the Mexican Ranchos - Looking Beyond 4th Grade (2017)
The Mexican Ranchos of the 18th and 19th centuries represent a niche in California history which is not often well understood by students of any age. From elementary school education to popular media, the focus in California tends to be on either the precontact Native Americans or the Spanish Missions. The Ranchos are host to a pluralistic community, including laborers, visitors, traders, owners, and overseers. Fairly representing these multiple voices can be difficult, but by presenting diverse...
Charcoal Identification as Means of Central California Landscape Reconstruction (2015)
The purpose of my paper is to present a paleoethnobotanical study of a late prehistoric Central California site (located in Sonoma County) that reconstructs the pre-contact landscape via the identification of wood charcoal remains. The analysis of charcoal and the low-impact paleoethnobotancial methodologies utilized in this study provide the basis for generating hypotheses about how Native peoples interacted with the local environment while also considering how the landscape may have changed...
Childhood Diet and Foraging in Prehistoric Central California (2015)
Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that hunter-gatherer children may forage effectively, where ecology, subsistence strategies, and social organization are conducive to juvenile participation. We hypothesize that, in easily navigated environments with food items accessible to children, juveniles will engage in assistive or independent foraging after a period of exclusive post-weaning parental provisioning, and that differences in male and female diets will reflect the sexual division of labor...
Climate change risk assessment of coastal archaeological resources in San Diego County (2017)
Climate change poses threats to both inland and coastal archaeological resources alike. Sites along the coast of San Diego County are under various threats such as inundation and erosion due to sea level rise. For over two years, the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) and the San Diego County Archaeological Society (SDCAS) have been directing the Climate Change Project to assess the effects of climate change on San Diego County resources. This study utilizes GIS analysis to examine coastal...
Colonial America Visits Colonial California: A Scenic Transfer-printed Vessel at Mission Santa Clara de Asís (2018)
Ceramics can often be used to identify changes in artifact assemblages on a scale of years, rather than in generations or centuries. There are potentially some useful applications of absolute and relative dating techniques for ceramic assemblages recovered from California’s Spanish missions. Recent excavations at Mission Santa Clara’s Rancheria (Indian Village) produced an assemblage of imported English ceramics, some with tightly defined production dates, which aids in our interpretation of the...
Cruising Along the Coastline: Exploring the Possibilities of using LiDAR Data to predict Climate Change Affects Along the Southern Monterey Coast (2015)
This paper presents the collaborative efforts of the Society for California Archaeology, the US Forest Service and the Cabrillo College Archaeological field school to document sites along the southern Monterey coastline. During the 2012 field season, a new generation of archaeologists documented sites along a 2-mile stretch of coastline in order to study how coastal erosion is affecting these sites. Part of the purpose of this presentation is to highlight the importance of these types of...
Diving into the Past: The Corsair at Crystal Cove State Marine Conservation Area (2016)
Crystal Cove State Park is home to many unique cultural resources that tell the story of California’s fascinating past. Its marine conservation area is no less extraordinary. In 1949, a Navy F4U Corsair airplane met its watery grave off the coast of Crystal Cove. Since its rediscovery, this underwater site has been studied and recorded by California State Parks with the assistance of other institutions. In 2014, the California State Parks Dive Team revisited the Corsair to evaluate its current...
Evocative Stones: Variable Obsidian Source Use in Northern California (2015)
Northern California contains multiple, geochemically distinct, high-quality obsidian sources that were quarried in prehistory. However, not all were exploited equally. Instead, selection patterns suggest that some obsidian sources were reserved for manufacture of specific types of objects, while others could be used for more routine tools. The geologic and cultural context of the obsidian source may offer explanations for why differential quarrying and use occurred. Glass Mountain in Siskiyou...
Fort Ross, A Russian American Company Settlement On The California Coast (1812-1841) (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1812 the Russian American Company (RAC), a fur hunting monopoly headquartered at New Archangel (Sitka) Alaska, commenced construction of a fortified settlement on the coast of northern California. Although the primary purpose was to facilitate the hunting of fur bearing sea mammals, it was also meant to be...
Framing the View: The Transformation of Land Use along the California Coast during the World War Eras (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "California: Post-1850s Consumption and Use Patterns in Negotiated Spaces" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. California State University Channel Islands campus was originally constructed as the former Camarillo State Mental Hospital. This location serves as a case study for examining changes in communities and land use in California throughout time. Archaeological surveys on campus, artifact analyses, and...
Global Networks of Trade, Migration and Consumption: Evidence from the Gold Rush-Era Fauna at Thompson’s Cove (CA-SFR-186H), San Francisco, California (2015)
San Francisco, originally known as Yerba Buena, became a confluence of international trade, human migration and commercial activity during the California Gold Rush (1848-1855). How did the massive influx of argonauts to the San Francisco Bay area affect domestic, native and exotic fauna in this region? A recently excavated site, Thompson’s Cove (CA-SFR-186H), located on the original shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove in present day downtown San Francisco, provides new evidence into this global...
High-Precision Chronology Building at Coastal Sites on California’s Channel Islands (2013)
Using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) techniques and chronology building calibration software that incorporates Bayesian statistics, it is possible to establish high-precision chronologies for complex sites. This includes shell midden sites, which are common along coastlines in the United States and often contain multiple distinct strata. We present the example of SCRI-333, on the western end of Santa Cruz Island, California. At this site, we selected carbonized twig and marine shell...
Historic Resources Assessment Naval Facility Centerville Beach Ferndale, Humboldt County, California (BLM) (1994)
Naval Facility (NAVFAC) Centerville Beach has been disestablished by the Navy and is proposed for disposal as surplus property by the General Services Administration. Uribe and Associates, under contract to the Western Division, Naval Facilities Engineering Command, was directed to conduct a Historic Resources Assessment of the facility as pan of environmental analyses being performed prior to declaring the property surplus. The focus of this cultural resource assessment is to document each...
IDENTIFICATION OF CHARCOAL FROM CAL CITY CAVE, CA-KER-517, CALIFORNIA (2002)
Charcoal recovered from a small, but well-developed midden with a high concentration of rock and charcoal in the Cal City Cave, CA-KER-517, was submitted for identification. This site is located within the corporate boundaries of California City in southeastern Kern County, California. It consists of a small rock shelter that is believed to have functioned as a work station for the processing of faunal material in the historic/protohistoric time period. Charcoal was identified to provide...
Impact of Rising Sea Levels on Native American Cultural Sites in Southern California (2015)
Humans arrived in Southern California about 13,000 years ago, shortly after sea level began rising following the last glaciation. Most of their sites along the shoreline of the time have been inundated and are unknown. Now hundreds of remaining sites on-shore are threatened, or will be threatened, in the foreseeable future by rising sea levels. A survey of prehistoric and historic human site elevations in Southern California reveals the 1.4 m rise in sea level expected in 2100 due only to the...
Importation of deer bone to the Channel Islands, California, during the Middle Holocene (2015)
Although California mule deer never inhabited the Channel Islands during prehistoric times, deer limb bone fragments commonly occur at Channel Islands sites dated to the Middle Holocene, and fragments of worked deer bone also occur. In addition, mortuary collections obtained in the 1920s dating to the Middle Holocene contain artifacts of deer bone, including ornaments and hair pins. We summarize the evidence of deer bone importation to the Channel Islands and argue that the abundance of deer...