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

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Title: California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 18 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 14:34:42 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:52 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:52

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

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Being aware that the years left to elderly Native Americans were numbered, Kroeber placed his emphasis on describing traditional culture, language, and prehistory. Because his was the state’s major department of anthropology, he also laid the groundwork for California archaeology. His students would carry the discipline further and train many of the archaeologists who dominate the field in the 1990s. Of Kroeber’s students, Robert F. Heizer was perhaps the most notable. Like Kroeber a faculty member of the Berkeley department, Heizer trained a generation of California archaeologists and was one of the first to publish a scholarly work on California’s magnificent rock art. He is not known to have done much ethnographic field work, but he wrote hundreds of books and papers on the archaeology, ethnography, and ethnohistory of California Indians, and after Kroeber’s death continued the various University of California serial publications in anthropology. He also edited Ballena Press Publications in Archaeology, Ethnology, and History. 19 He devoted considerable time in the later years of his life to editing and publishing the works of C. Hart Merriam. Many of the results of the studies initiated in Kroeber’s, later Heizer’s, department and those of their students were published in the several sets of serials published under the auspices of the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. John Peabody Harrington, an ethnographer and linguist whose professional lifespan paralleled that of Kroeber’s, collected a body of data that rivals that of Kroeber and his students. For most of his life Harrington was employed by the Smithsonian Institution. Driven by a determination to salvage information from surviving Indian elders who remembered traditional life, Harrington, whose published works are few, traveled from group to group taking notes. He left behind such an enormous collection of field notes in various stages of analysis that organizing them and making them available to the public has occupied succeeding generations of anthropologists for some thirty years, and may well continue to do so for another thirty years.?° One result of Harrington’s work is that groups such as the Gabrielino, Chumash, and Costanoan/Ohlone, which as recently as twentyfive years ago were considered to have become extinct before it was possible for anthropologists to understand their cultures, have since become well known. In the early part of the twentieth century a series of books on California missions by Fray Zephyrin Engelhardt drew attention to the records of the Spanish missions as sources of information on California’s Indians during the mission period. Several decades later, Sherburne F. Cook, a professor of biological sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed mission records to test hypotheses about the effects of various mission policies on the health and welfare of native Californians who were drawn into the mission system. A later generation has begun a more intense analysis of the records to learn about aboriginal social structure, use of the landscape, ethnic boundaries, and acculturation. The proposed sainthood of mission founder Junipero Serra has encouraged a polemical slant to some of these studies. Ethnographer John Peabody Harrington ona field trip near Santa Ines, northwest of Santa Barbara, 1918. Courtesy Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. 336 CALIFORNIA HISTORY