New Deal Archaeology at Buena Vista Lake in the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Madre Mountains: The 1933-34 CWA-Smithsonian Institution Project in Southern California

Summary

Perhaps the earliest Federal Civil Works Administration (CWA) archaeological project in California was conducted during the winter of 1933-34 at five sites along Buena Vista Lake in Kern County by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), Smithsonian Institution. The project location was chosen for several reasons: mild winter climate, high number of unemployed men from nearby oil towns, and large, deep prehistoric sites. At the height of the excavations, the labor force amounted to 187 men. BAE archaeologists William D. Strong and William M. Walker directed the work, with field supervision by Edwin F. Walker (Southwest Museum), and UC Berkeley graduate student Waldo R. Wedel, who later wrote the final report. As an outgrowth of the project and in order to determine the boundary between the Yokuts and eastern Chumash, Strong conducted a two-week archaeological reconnaissance in nearby Cuyama Valley and the Sierra Madre Mountains with local cattle rancher James G. James, who had explored archaeological sites in the region containing well-preserved perishable artifacts and was a distant relative of the author (my grandfather’s first cousin). The significant results of the CWA-Smithsonian Buena Vista Lake project and subsequent survey by Strong and James are discussed in this presentation.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• A New Deal for Western Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage