Reading Colonial Transitions: Archival Evidence and the Archaeology of Indigenous Action in Mexican California

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Chronicles of Colonialism: Unraveling Temporal Variability in Indigenous Experiences of Colonization in California Missions", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Recent archaeological research in the San Francisco Bay Area has demonstrated that Indigenous people maintained diverse cultural practices—such as the production and conveyance of stone tools and shell beads—during the region’s Spanish mission period. However, Native persistence during the aftermath of the missions is often difficult to locate archaeologically given the geographic dispersal of the mission communities and the introduction of mass-produced material culture. In this paper, we revisit the documentary record created during the secularization period of Mexican California (ca. 1833-1848) to assess how archival evidence may encourage new lines of archaeological inquiry and help undo the politics of erasure that have affected tribal groups in our region. To do so, we offer examples from our individual and collective research, undertaken in collaboration with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, regarding long-term Native persistence in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Chronicles of Colonialism: Unraveling Temporal Variability in Indigenous Experiences of Colonization in California Missions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow