A "Lost" Collection Makes Its Way Home: The Long Road of the Lost Village of Encino

Summary

When a major village site was encountered during construction monitoring in the early 1980s, newspapers declared that the "Lost Village of Encino" had at last been found. In reality, archaeologists suspected its presence since the 1950s based on descriptions of the Portolá expeditions of 1769 and 1770. The resulting archaeological data recovery produced a large collection of artifacts, as well as human and animal burials. Subsequent disputes between the developer, archaeologists, the Native American community, the State Department of Parks and Recreation and even the California Legislature tested the limits of relatively new cultural resources laws in California, and the Encino Village collection remained in limbo, without a complete analysis or a permanent home. This paper will discuss the current efforts to address the situation and to bring this important San Fernando Valley collection back home, so that both researchers and the Fernandeño people have an available connection to the past.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Crisis and Opportunity: Legacy Collections and Archaeological Research in the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage