Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Aboriginal Trade Between the Southwest and California Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Robert F. Heizer Source(s): The Masterkey p185 # of Pages: 3 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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186 THE eM ASTERKEY the Santa Barbara Channel region seems to have been a major supply source of shell (raw and manufactured forms) for the Southwest. These materials spread eastward via the GilaPacific and Arizona-Pacific trails.’ The presence of shell-. bead types originating in California on dated Southwestern. sites might very easily provide the key which would unlock the door to the chronology of the Santa Barbara archeological cultures,® and, in turn, those of Central California.® : E. W. Gifford’s forthcoming studies on Californian shell — artifacts will make available the classification and strati-_ graphic position of shell-bead types. What we now most need is a typological study of shell objects from the Southwest done as carefully and completely as Brand’s work on shell species. Each type of shell artifact should be clearly illustrated, identified as to species, and each should be accom~ panied by the data (if on record) indicating site provenience and dating. Studies of trade relations need not be based wholly on shell . remains, as Colton’s data clearly indicate. For example, in a California coast midden at Redondo were found two Sedentary Hohokam red-on-buff sherds.1° The culture level probably would not be dated earlier than 900 a. p., judging from the age of the pottery type in its homeland. Grooved axes of indubitable Southwestern origin are found in the Santa Barbara Channel region; a careful inquiry as to their locus of origin would require accurate typological and mineralogical determination. Californian objects other than shells occa— sionally turn up in the Southwest—witness the tubular steatite pipe found by Roberts in the Piedra District and dating from Pueblo I times.?* Objective remains alone need not provide our only evidences, since the abundant historical records often attest trade 7 Rogers, M. J., op. cit.: map, p. 4. Brand, op. cit. (1938) ; map, p. 8 Colton, 1941; map, p. 311. Farmer, op. cit.: map. 8 For which see D. B. Rogers, Prehistoric Man of the Santa Barbara Coast, Santa Barbara, 1929. R. L. Olson, Chumash Prehistory, University — of California Publ. in Amer. Arch. and Eth., v. 28, no. 1, 1930. G. F. Carter, Archaeological notes on a Midden at Point Sal, American Antiquity, — v. 6: 214-226, 1941. °R. F. Heizer, Some Sacramento Valley Santa Barbara Archeological Relationships, Masterkey, v. 13: 31-35, 1939. 1® Gila Pueblo Medallion, no. 16, p. 204. 41 Museum of American Indian, Heye-Fdn., Indian Notes and Monographs, v. 4: 66. 32 Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 96; pl. 37h, p. 152. THE eALASTERKEY 187 contacts between native groups. Costansd, for example, recorded Californian-Southwest trade in 1770:** Among them: [i.e. Chumash] were seen some pieces of “broadsword, iron, and fragments of wrought silver, which, being of small value, surprised our men. Being questioned by signs how they obtained these things, they gave to understand that [they received them] from the interior, toward the east. Fr. Font in 1776 stated that the Channel Indians had commerce with the tribes of the Colorado river, and the trade was in “beads consisting of flat, round, and small shells which they hunt for in the sands of the beach. . .” At Rincon, Font saw an Indian ‘who wore a cotton blanket like those made by the Gila Pimas, and.. inferred that he must have acquired it from that great distance by means of the commerce which they have with others.”’** Francisco Garcés recorded much evidence of the trade between Indians of the Colorado river and the California coast. He saw five Mohave Indians returning from San Gabriel Mission where they had been to procure seashells. He also pleaded against Spanish interference in what he called “the legitimate and most ancient commerce of the nations of the Colorado river with those of the sea, which consists of certain white shells.”25 As late as 1819, 22 Mohave appeared at San Buenaventura to trade.*® : Trade relations of this sort, if carried out over a long period of time, might effect noticeable cultural exchange. There seems to be at least one instance of this kind which goes far to explain the puzzling occurrence at Buena Vista Lake (in the Southern San Joaquin valley) of some burials accompanied by a “potato-masher” club, soft twined bags, woven cotton cloth, and of an individual with the hair done up in long, gummed, -pencil-like locks.17 All of these features are non-Yokuts in character, but decidedly reminiscent of cultural items of the Lower Colorado river tribes (e.g. Mohave). Kroeber is im13-Van Hemert-Engert, A., and Teggart, F. J. The Narrative of the Portola Expedition of 1769-1770 by Miguel Costanso, Publ. Acad. Pacific Coast Hist., v. 1, no. 4, 1910, p. 49. (It appears that Caucasian-made objects preceded the Spanish themselves to the Santa Barbara area.) 34 Bolton, H. E., Font’s Complete Diary, Berkeley, 1931, pp. 250, 257. 45 Coues, E., On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer; Francisco Garcés, 17751776, N. Y., 1900, v. I-. (v. I: 248, 254-55; v. I: 357, 414.) 1° Bancroft, H. H., History of California, v. 1, 1801-1824, San Francisco, 1886 (p. 332). ’ 17 Kroeber, A. L., The Indians of California, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78, 1925 (pp. 934-35). Gifford, E. W., and Schenck, WwW. E., Archaeology of the Southern San Joaquin Valley, California, Univ. of Calif. Publ. in American Arch. and Eth., v. 23, no. 1, 1926 (pp. 104-112).