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

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Title: Papers of John P. Harrington Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Johnson, Miller & Agren Source(s): Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History # of Pages: 12 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-08-30 13:56:17 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:50:04 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:50:04

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

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370 ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS 33 NO. 4 Besides the Venturetio ethnographic notes from Fernando Librado, there is a fair amount of Barbarefio Chumash linguistic material from Harrington’s work with Mary Yee in the 1950s. The Chumash portion of the collection also includes carbon copies of slip files and typed texts of Ineseno and Barbareno myths and stories. The extent to which these latter items duplicate what is already available on microfilm has not yet been determined. Related to the Chumash material, there are fairly extensive notes on Santa Barbara history and archaeology compiled during 1923-24, when Harrington was directing excavations at the Burton Mound. Many of these are in typewritten form and may duplicate what is already available in the microfilm in their original handwritten versions. The bulk of the archaeological field notes, and perhaps many of the interview notes as well, were prepared by David Banks Rogers—who was hired by Harrington, along with the latter’s childhood friend George Bayley—during the archaeological investigations at Burton Mound that eventually culminated in Harrington’s 1928 publication for the Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report (Harrington 1928). Rogers and Bayley built a large metal structure they called the “Ironclad” on a lot owned by Harrington in Santa Barbara. This storage building met some of Harrington’s space requirements for his growing collection of field notes and artifacts and served as a place to park his automobile when he was in the East. Harrington and Rogers became close friends during the Burton Mound period. Soon, however, George Heye withdrew funding from Harrington’s archaeological ventures, and Rogers gained employment from the fledgling Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History as its first curator of anthropology. Among the more prevalent portions of the ethnographic and linguistic papers in the collection is material relating to Mohave territoriality and geography. These notes, many of which can be derived from published sources, may pertain to research in the 1950s that Harrington conducted to assist the Mohave tribe in a court case regarding land claims (see description of correspondence below). Other linguistic papers reflect Harrington’s lifelong interest in personal names and placenames. A large bundle of handwritten notes on pages of all shapes and sizes pertains to the origin of personal names, family names, and nicknames among the world’s cultures. His interest apparently began very early in his career, and he pursued it at various times throughout his life. (Requests for information sent to the Bureau of American Ethnology often stimulated research on placenames of Indian origin.) Harrington published a number of articles on this subject, one of which was his treatise on the origins of all of our states’ names (Harrington 1955). A series of notes regarding the state name Massachusetts is an example of his continued interest in this type of research late in his life. One interesting development of our project to sort the papers in the Harrington collection has been the discovery of a few Costanoan word lists from George De Soto, the second husband of Harrington’s Barbareno Chumash