Understanding Island Tongva Villages: Results From the Catalina Island Museum's Toyon Collection

Summary

The Catalina Island Museum (CIM) cares for the largest collection of Island Tongva (Gabrielino) artifacts in the world, the results of early expeditions, modern excavations as well as objects donated by Catalina Islanders. Opened in 1953, the Catalina Island Museum boasts a wealth of historic, archaeological, and archival materials that document life from the first islanders 8000 years ago to the present day, and strives to provide awareness and appreciation of the island’s rich heritage through the use of research, exhibition and educational programs. However, most of the collection remains unstudied and unanalyzed and in some instances in the same paper bags that they were put in over 50 years ago. This presentation will discuss the importance of using legacy collections to understand Island Tongva lifeways and provide the results of one such collection from Toyon Bay, on Catalina Island, California.

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