One of California's Earliest Visitors: The Discovery of Transbay Man

The unexpected discovery of a well-preserved Native American burial 55 feet beneath the Transbay Transit Center site is incredibly exciting. The matrix surrounding the skeleton has provided unparalleled preservation of the human remains and the organic materials surrounding the burial. The adult male was wrapped in a large woven mat and fragments of a wood implement that resembles an atlatl were found at his hand. To date none of the burials recovered from San Francisco, the Bay Area, or central California, have preserved evidence of this nature. AMS radiocarbon dating indicates an age of 7570 cal BP, increasing the importance of this find in terms of the history of San Francisco and the history of native peoples throughout California. Burials from this time period are exceptionally rare, and the context in which the burial was found was deeper, older, and wetter than expected. This individual represents the potential to trace some of the earliest people to inhabit California, and to make a connection between them and the material culture and traditions that we know from historic period observations of living natives.