Borderlands, Continuances and Violence: A Social Nexus at Black Star Canyon, San Juan Capistrano California

Summary

Post European contact the historicity of the Santa Ana Mountain landscape of Orange County, California has been popularly constructed around the narratives of bucolic mission and ranch life, and that of the "wild frontier". The interplay between both histories has contributed to a memorialization of the Santa Ana Mountains as a borderland space during the Spanish, Mexican and American colonial eras that deemphasizes indigenous social life. This paper seeks to complicate the historical concept of a colonial borderland by exploring ways in which the mountain space enabled or disabled local and non-local indigenous practices of social and economic subversion. Lastly, this paper discusses the author’s ongoing collaborative research on identifying multicomponent "runaway" sites, and indigenous movement through archaeological survey and the integration of oral history.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeology of the American West   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage