Documenting Persistence: The Archaeological Paper Trail of Indigenous Residence in Marin County, California, 1579-1934

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As part of our broader efforts to document patterns of Native American residence in the nineteenth century, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. This paper trail begins with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s, which focused exclusively on detailing the area’s precontact deposits. Archaeologists’ attention to more recent materials and sites grew slowly over the course of the twentieth century, along with the increasing temporal classification of sites into prehistoric, protohistoric, and historic periods. Our findings reveal the shortcomings of this traditional site recording system. In many records, mass produced consumer goods were simply dismissed or assumed to have been deposited by white settlers. In other cases, items typically viewed by archaeologists as evidence of postcontact indigenous occupation were absent, but continued site use is indicated by radiocarbon or obsidian hydration dates. In assessing sites occupied by indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of native residence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about indigenous culture change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23196