California (Other Keyword)
26-50 (57 Records)
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...
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...
Interpreting the Yreka Chinatown Collection through a Modern Lens (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Arming the Resistance: Recent Scholarship in Chinese Diaspora Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the Spring of 1969, California State Park archaeologists conducted excavations at Yreka’s third Chinatown, prior to its destruction by the construction of Interstate 5. It was one of the earliest excavations of a Chinese community in California, and one of the first large-scale historical...
Legacies of Movement and Land Use in the Mojave Desert: An Intensive Study of Two Multi-Component Sites at Fort Irwin, San Bernardino County, California (2015)
Fort Irwin is a United States Army installation located approximately 37 miles northeast of Barstow in San Bernardino County, California. Covering an area of 1,193 square miles, Fort Irwin is roughly the size of Rhode Island. This large installation has a wide variety of archaeological resources, including two large, multi-component sites that were re-recorded by the Fort Irwin Cultural Resources Program in 2014. Bitter Spring (CA-SBR-2659/H) is a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP)...
Life in a new land: Russian Molokans in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (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. In the early 1900s, Molokans, a Russian-speaking religious community, immigrated to the United States to avoid religious persecution and conscription into the Tsars army. Smaller groups of Molokans settled throughout California and Baja California but the largest concentration was in East Los...
Loss of the USS Milwaukee (C-21): An Archaeological Study of a World War I-era U.S. Navy Disaster in Northern California (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. On December 15, 1916 the USS H-3 (SS-30) went aground on Samoa Beach near Eureka, California while trying to find the entrance to Humboldt Bay in dense fog. Roughly a month later during the early morning hours of January 13, 1917, the USS Milwaukee (C-21), a St. Louis class semi-armored cruiser, attempted to pull the submarine off the beach, despite multiple warnings from locals of...
MACROFLORAL ANALYSIS OF SAMPLES FROM SITE CA-SBA-990, NORTH VANDENBURG AIR FORCE BASE, CALIFORNIA (2005)
Six soil samples from undifferentiated midden deposits at site CA-SBA-990 on North Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, were floated to recover macrofloral remains. This site is a lithic and shell deposit containing chert debitage, flaked stone tools, marine shell, fish and terrestrial animal bone, shell beads, fire-altered rock, and ground stone tools. Radiocarbon dates from shell at the site suggest occupation from the Late Prehistoric into the Protohistoric, approximately A.D....
Mapping Prehistoric Behavior Patterns at Lithic Toolstone Source in the Colorado Desert (2017)
This pilot study examines lithic artifact scatters recorded in the Colorado Desert of California. The data set used in this research was compiled from several Cultural Resource Management (CRM) projects that have taken place in the study area. Tierra Environmental Services of San Diego collected large portions of data located on cobblestone terraces in Imperial County, California between 2011 and 2013 (smaller sections have been recorded by various environmental consulting firms since the mid...
Micromorphological Studies from the Clear Lake Basin California (2015)
Geoarchaeology has a wide range of applications for the understanding of the past. Within geoarchaeology, since the 1980s, micromorphological analysis has become a more common worldwide research tool for the study of soils from archaeological sites because it can play an important role in understanding site formation through the research of human waste, occupation debris, fuel residues and animal waste. It can serve as an aid in the reconstruction of human occupation, help identify economic...
Palimpsests in the Colonial Borderland at Black Star Canyon, Orange County, California. (2016)
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...
Pay Dirt in the Mojave Desert: An Assistance Agreement between Cal Poly Pomona and the California Bureau of Land Management (2015)
This paper reports on more than a decade of archaeological fieldwork conducted at two archaeological landscapes in the western Mojave Desert by Cal Poly Pomona undergraduate students on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Ridgecrest Field Office. The majority of funding for the project was provided by a multi-year BLM Assistance Agreement. It represents an outstanding example of a "win-win" partnership between a university and government agencies. Students received training in...
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...
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...
Revisiting Sacramento’s Gold Rush: Maritime Archeological Investigation in the Sacramento River (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2018, archaeologists from SEARCH and California Department of Parks and Recreation conducted an underwater remote-sensing survey in the Sacramento River, Sacramento County, California. The survey focused on relocating and assessing the condition of three vessels associated with the Sacramento gold rush: the Sterling and La Grange in downtown Sacramento and the Clarksburg Wreck...
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 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....
Room for All: A Pluralistic Approach to Privileged Spaces (2017)
During the 18th and 19th centuries, California Rancho adobe residences were the center of daily interactions between laborers, visitors, traders, owners, and overseers. Common interpretive recreations of the region’s adobe residences emphasize the land owners and residential uses of adobe structures. This is done to the exclusion of understanding the pluralistic nature of the adobe uses in space and time, and the diverse community of colonists and indigenous laborers who worked and lived within...
Shipwrecks, Doghole Ports, and the Lumber Trade: Maritime Cultural Landscape Survey of California’s Sonoma Coast (2017)
California’s Sonoma Coast is a rugged and beautiful seashore with a wealth of natural resources extending from kelp forests to redwood groves. Humans have interacted with this marine environment for thousands of years; it has shaped their lives and they have left their mark on the landscape. During the mid-19th and early 20th century, the Sonoma lumber trade greatly affected the coastal environment as it contributed to the economic development of the American West Coast. In 2016, California...
A Socioeconomic Interpretation of 19th Century Archaeological Ceramics found at Contemporaneous, Culturally Diverse Sites on Ballast Point in San Diego, California (2016)
This research assesses the degree to which the type, form, and function of 19th century ceramics recovered from archaeological sites on Ballast Point reflect ethnic identities of their owners. A dualistic approach is employed to determine whether culture or economy played a greater role in influencing the acquisition of ceramic goods at these sites. Comparisons are drawn from contemporaneous deposits associated with a Chinese fishing camp (Trench 2), and a European American whaling operation...
Solving the Mystery of the Black’s India Pale Ale Bottle from the John Marsh House, Contra Costa County, California (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During excavations at the John Marsh House built in the mid-1850s several whole bottles were found in the foundation trench. Two were Hunyadi Janos bottles, but the third was an exciting find because it still retained a paper label that was mostly intact that said “Black’s India Pale Ale.” Over the next thirty years efforts to learn more about this bottle were ineffectual. However,...
Solvitur Ambulando: Geophysical Surveys at Mission San Antonio de Padua, California (2018)
A Program of multimedia geopysical survey of the entire complex of Mission San Antonio is being conducted over a multiyear period. A great deal of information has been gleaned from non-destrucrtiuve, non-intrusive research allowing achaeologists to focus more clearly on specifiuc areas of interest and provide an inventory to help land managers to preserve as much of this-well preserved archaeological site as possible. The project highlights the benefil of the results of collaboration between...
Spatial Signatures of Ceremony and Social Interaction: GIS Exploratory Analysis and Spatial Modeling at Tule Creek Village (CA-SNI-25), San Nicolas Island, California (2017)
The spatial patterning of artifacts and features excavated from the Tule Creek site (CA-SNI-25), San Nicolas Island, provides an opportunity to analyze the intra-site correlations between artifact types, materials, and features. Excavations at East Locus at CA-SNI-25 have yielded evidence of trade with other islands as well as evidence suggesting complex ceremonial activity, such as dog and bird burials, large hearths, stacked stone features, and multiple discrete pits. Here we use GIS...
Spatial, Technological, and Functional Characteristics of Ceramics along the Southern California Coast (2017)
Prehistoric ceramics found across southern California have a discrete spatial distribution. While locally manufactured ceramics are common to the south and southeast of the Los Angeles River, prehistoric ceramic sherds are rare in deposits located to the northwest. This marked distribution is potentially explained through a few hypotheses. Populations to the north may have had access to resources necessary for pottery alternatives or may have differed in their settlement patterns, mobility,...
The State of the State of California Curation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Wendy Teeter, Stevy Hernandez, and Xochitl Aguinaga from the Fowler Museum at UCLA were part of an implementation committee initiating the California Curatorial Survey which was distributed to professionals from a variety of institutions. The 2018 Society of California...