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

About This Item:

Title: Some Explanations for the Rise of Cultural Complexity Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 15 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 23:26:21 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:52:17 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:52:17

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

Page: of 15  

28 historical accounts by Spanish missionaries and explorers reveals for the most part an abysmal lack of curiosity about the culture of California Indians. As Harrington (1934:1) pointed out, nothing worthy of being called an ethnological treatise survived the Spanish occupation of California except Father Geronimo Boscana’s Chinigchinich, written in 1821, late in the mission period. The primitive state of the native economy was characterized for Father Boscana (Harrington 1934:55) by the fact that "...in no part of the province was to be found aught but the common, spontaneous productions of the earth." If agriculture was a hallmark of civilization to the Spanish, so it was with the later nineteenth century American historians, products of an agrarian society, who viewed farming as the evolutionary goal of human civilization. The romantic myth of the mission fathers tutoring culturally retrograde Indians in crop-growing achieved such popularity in this period that the native cultures of California had little appeal for scholars. Even to Bancroft (1883:I, 324), it was axiomatic that along the shores of the Pacific man had "sunk almost to the darkness of the brute." Despite views of some early anthropologists to the contrary (Barrows 1900; Gifford 1931), pioneer researchers in California generally accepted the historical dogma that the westward extension of southwestern agriculture halted among the Yuman peoples of the Colorado River. Any data suggesting agricultural knowledge existed among some California groups was attributed to being the result of mission influence. Hooper (1920:328), for example, first noted the presence of characteristic plants of southwestern agriculture in Cahuilla myth, but left unexplored Kroeber’s (1908b:41) assertion that the Cahuilla were not farmers. Only recently have anthropologists begun to investigate the extent to which crop-growing may have penetrated California and why it was not extensive. In another recent paper, Henry T. Lewis (1972:217) pointed out one of the main barriers to a more profound understanding of the cultures of native California and the means by which these predominantly hunting and gathering peoples exploited their environment: Ecologically, we must ignore the evolutionary assumptions that the development of agriculture was somehow natural and desirable. Instead of viewing agriculture as an imminent goal of human evolution, we should rather ask the question: Why should hunters and gatherers become agriculturists? While this suggestion may be at variance with our most cherished ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘human 29 development, we can more effectively pose ecologically pertinent questions if we are not overburdened by a mass of unexamined folk assumptions which cannot be tested. Lewis (1973) has suggested such ecosystem analyses as his own may assist anthropologists in posing new questions as to the role which men, using certain technological strategies, played in a given system of environmental relationships. Indeed, his paper is rich in suggestive material deserving study by anthropologists. We shall concern ourselves, however, with the light which his paper may throw on the problem of why agriculture failed to spread in California. First, we will briefly review the literature concerned with this problem. Then, we will summarize some additional data compiled by Lewis and ourselves indicating that burning was also a significant form of environmental manipulation among Indians in the southern part of California. Although Aschmann (1959) presented evidence that fires set by Indians in southern California were a factor in the persistence of the wild landscape, he provided no data from Spanish sources showing the practice was aboriginal and little data on burning among specific Indian groups. Finally, we shall discuss Heizer’s thesis that California was in a Preformative stage that can be termed "semi-agricultural" at the time of the Spanish conquest, and seek to apply this idea in terms of Lewis’s findings. THE PROBLEM OF ABORIGINAL AGRICULTURE IN CALIFORNIA Although his hypothesis in recent years has been credited to others, H.J. Spinden (1917) appears to have been the first to suggest that the acorn economy of California prevented dispersal of agriculture westward from the Colorado River, where it was practiced in the prehispanic era. In discussing those intermediate types of environment most favorable to agriculture but where it failed to become established, Spinden (1917:Z70), wrote: The abundant harvests of wild acorns in California, of wokas in southern Oregon, of wappato along the Columbia, of camas and kous in the pleasant uplands of Idaho, and of wild rice in the lake regions of Minnesota and southern Canada were effectual barriers against the