What Should We Call the Rocks in Living California Landscapes?

Summary

As archaeologists in Central California shift towards understanding indigenous agencies within the indigenous landscapes of colonial contact (Panich and Schneider 2015) an opportunity has arrived for the field to consider the practical implications of autochthonous Central Californian relationships and ontological perspectives for research praxis. The question posed in this paper, is what are rocks as interlocutors in relationships; how do you think of a rock when it is a part of a place that is recognized to be vibrant, living, and interconnected with living and ancestral Central California peoples. Fire-cracked rocks, rounded river stones, and other rocks that are not obvious flaked or ground stone tools are a prominent component of archaeological sites that are little recorded and often not recovered from the field. While collection strategies are an important pragmatic part of archaeological investigations, the fields privileging of formal tools and chronologically significant artifacts miss potential information about many pieces of places that are not understood. In this paper, I discuss examples within the ethnographic archive that may help us consider the role that rocks have played in the autochthonous landscapes of the past and present, which might otherwise have eluded western eyes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21587