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Publications (52)
The Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay area and the Paipai of northern Baja California occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of Native Californian identities. Or so it would appear. While the Ohlone lack popular recognition and official acknowledgement from the United States government, the Paipai occupy a large reserve and celebrate their ongoing cult...
To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early...
This article seeks to define common ground from which to build a more integrated approach to the persistence of indigenous societies in North America. Three concepts are discussed— identity, practice, and context— that may prove useful for the development of archaeologies
of persistence by allowing us to counter terminal narratives and essentialist...
This paper explores how the materiality of the past has been mobilized to simultaneously erase Indigenous presence and create white public space at Spanish mission sites in California. As the site of present-day Santa Clara University, Mission Santa Clara de Asís presents an important case study. The documentary record associated with more than a c...
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has long been involved in the archaeology and stewardship of their ancestral homelands, both through their own cultural resource management (CRM) firm and though collaborations with academic and CRM archaeologists. In this article, we build on the past 40 years of archaeological collaborations in the southern San Francisco...
Archaeologists in North America and elsewhere are increasingly examining long-term Indigenous presence across multiple colonial systems, despite lingering conceptual and methodological challenges. We examine this issue in California, where archaeologists and others have traditionally overlooked Native persistence in the years between the official c...
Although California lies on the Pacific Coast of North America, its colonial history has enduring ties to the Atlantic. This paper examines the archaeology of these Atlantic connections with a consideration of the impacts of Euroamerican colonization and Indigenous persistence. The first European explorations of the region began in the sixteenth ce...
Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence advances new perspectives on the archaeology of colonialism in North America. Chapters prepared by archaeologists, tribal scholars, and heritage managers re-evaluate the theoretical and methodological approaches that have served to limit ways of seeing and understanding the persistence of Indigenous communities...
Archaeological excavations at California mission sites have revealed diverse projectile points manufactured and used by Indigenous people. Through the examination of assemblages from four central California missions—San José, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and San Carlos—this paper considers the potential of lithic technologies to illuminate the interrel...
Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative in...
As archaeology turns to the study of sustained colonialism, researchers are reassessing sites occupied by Native people from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In California, this was a particularly crucial time, with many Indigenous people creating social and economic ties with newcomers in order to maintain connections to their ancestral homeland...
This article considers a particular form of small, intricately serrated arrow points from central California. Several examples of this point were recovered during recent archaeological mitigation work at Mission Santa Clara de Asís (CA-SCL-30/H), where researchers have referred to them as Mission Santa Clara Serrated (MSCLS) points. Subsequent rese...
California’s Franciscan missions were grounded in Indigenous homelands that to this day remain largely undertheorized and trivialized by scholarly and popular understandings of missions as inescapable fortresses of confinement. Narratives that position California’s missions as places of Indigenous imprisonment endure but they are at odds with a gro...
A consistent challenge in community and collaborative archaeologies has been the appropriate identification and understanding of project constituencies. A key step in stakeholder analysis is understanding and harmonizing the goals of archaeological work to the social role of the institutions for which we work. To illustrate the value of such a stan...
Research on Native American interactions with colonial institutions increasingly stresses the persistence of indigenous places and identities despite the challenges wrought by missionary, mercantile, and settler colonialism. This article expands on the theme of persistence through a case study investigating the various ways indigenous people, inclu...
Modified ceramic disks have been recovered from historic-era sites across the Americas. Small unperforated disks are commonly interpreted as gaming pieces and larger perforated disks are often classified as spindle whorls. Here, we examine these interpretations in light of collections from three colonial-era sites in central California: Mission San...
In many regions, the mechanisms by which indigenous people acquired lithic materials during the colonial period are only poorly understood. We take on these issues through the examination of more than 1100 obsidian artifacts recovered from the Native American neighborhood at Mission San José (ca. CE 1797-1840) in central California. We conducted a...
This paper examines the marine reservoir effect for Tomales Bay, a 25.5-km-long tidal estuary along the northern coast of California. We determined the regional ∆R through radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) measurements of pre-1950 shells from a museum collection as well as archaeologically recovered shell samples from a historical railroad grade of known constru...
Historical maps have the potential to aid archaeological investigations into the persistence of Native American settlements during the mid-19th century, a time when many Native communities disappear from archaeological view. Focusing on Tomales Bay in central California, we evaluate the usefulness of historical maps as a way to discover and interpr...
Archaeological investigations at Mission San José in Fremont, California, have revealed large areas of the mission landscape, including portions of two adobe dwellings in the mission's Native American neighborhood. Preliminary synthesis of previous and ongoing research at Mission San José focuses on the implications of archaeological evidence for u...
This article offers a reassessment of the sources of archaeological obsidian found in southern California and northern Baja California based on new information regarding the geological availability of obsidian in Baja California, Mexico. In particular, we demonstrate that a previously unknown obsidian chemical group, referred to here as Tinajas obs...
In 2015, Pope Francis elevated Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra to sainthood, reinforcing the association between the California missions and the founding of Euroamerican colonies in western North America. Yet the canonization also leaves this discourse, and its associated narrative of indigenous decline, open to critique. Here, I examine two d...
Mission Santa Clara de Asís, a Franciscan mission in Alta California, was home to Ohlone/Costanoan, Yokuts, and Miwok people who perpetuated and reinterpreted mortuary practices at multiple points across the landscape. More than three decades of archaeological research at Mission Santa Clara has revealed burials and associated grave goods from two...
The X-ray fluorescence analysis of obsidian artifacts from four study areas in Baja California, Mexico, suggests regional and local patterning in the geological sources used by indigenous hunter-gatherers during the late prehistoric and colonial periods. Obsidian artifacts were typically made from materials from the closest geological source, creat...
This article uses a consumption framework to examine Native American use of shell and glass beads at the site of Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California. The analysis considers how indigenous people acquired beads within the mission system as well as the ways in which they integrated diverse types of beads into existing and emergent cultu...
Mission establishments in Alta California and elsewhere were home to complex, pluralistic communities in which native peoples actively but differentially negotiated aspects of colonialism through daily practice and the reinterpretation of identity. To explore these issues, we compare the archaeological evidence from two different indigenous dwellin...
Spanish missions in North America were once viewed as confining and stagnant communities, with native peoples on the margins of the colonial enterprise. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research challenges that notion. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions considers how native peoples actively incorporated the mission system into thei...
This article advocates for a comparative approach to archaeological studies of colonialism that considers how Native American societies with divergent political economies may have influenced various kinds of processes and outcomes in their encounters with European colonists. Three dimensions
of indigenous political economies (polity size, polity st...
The obsidian sources of northern Baja California remain understudied even though archaeological work in the region has expanded in recent decades. In this article, we provide descriptions and geochemical characterizations for several known and as-yet unlocated sources of artifact quality obsidian in the northern region of Baja California. These dat...
The indigenous groups incorporated into the Spanish missions of Alta and Baja California faced a variety of challenges during the colonial period and experienced a wide range of outcomes in the persistence of native identity. The indigenous Paipai community of Santa Catarina, located in northern Baja California, is composed of the direct descendant...
Mission Santa Catalina was founded on the margins of the Spanish colonial frontier in northern Baja California, but over time it became an important place in the indigenous landscape of the region. Dominican friars established the mission at a crossroads of native interaction, and recent archaeological, archival, and ethnographic research suggests...
The use of electronic total data stations for mapping archaeological sites is examined through two California case studies. Mission Santa Catalina, located in the high desert of Baja California, and a cluster of three shell mounds, located in a forest in the San Francisco Bay area, represent two different examples of organizing and implementing a m...
California Indians developed a system of management that was designed to influence the productivity and abundance of particular plants and animals. These people used fire to affect productivity and diversity across the broader landscape. By burning certain ecosystems at different intervals they created a patchwork of diverse habitats. The resulting...
The American Indian Quarterly 30.3&4 (2006) 388-415
Angela Cavender Wilson's 2004 essay "Reclaiming Our Humanity: Decolonization and the Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge" provides a useful starting point for considering the role of decolonization in both the academy and in our everyday lives. Wilson, as an Indigenous scholar, muses, "For what had I...
