The California coast was teeming with food, drawing early Native Americans and nourishing them for millennia. The Pacific Ocean served up a rich variety of fish, shellfish, and marine mammals. Inland, the people could hunt land animals and collect acorns, seeds, roots, and bulbs. Numerous fresh water streams were filled with fish. Food was so abundant that the coastal Indians of California never saw a need to take up farming. There were no cities or monumental architecture, only simple villages tied together by thriving networks of trade, religion, and community.
Lynn Gamble, a prominent archaeologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has brought together 27 notable archaeologists, ethnographers, and Native American scholars in this collection of 17 essays covering the major aspects of the story of the first coastal Californians. They developed a rich and diverse culture and their trade and social interactions helped them cope with sudden climatic shifts, violent storms, and prolonged droughts.
For more than 100 years, archaeologists have been excavating the remaining villages, shell mounds, and other remains in search of information about these remarkable people. In the past 13,000 years, the sea level has risen 250 feet as the last ice age came to an end. Some of this nation’s most intensive development has taken place here, and there has been a race against time to salvage information. Drawing on the latest in interdisciplinary research techniques, archaeologists have coaxed a vivid story from the earth. This volume also contains a discussion of watercraft, the key tool of coastal society for both collecting food and for trade. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence combine to give us a good picture of these boats, and they are being re-created today by modern Natives.
First Coastal Californians is written for the general public, and it is richly illustrated with black and white and color photographs, maps, and original drawings. The ninth volume in an excellent series on early Americans, it is a wonderful introduction to one of America’s most interesting and complex native cultures. —Mark Michel
