Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Marine Radiocarbon Reservoir Effect In Tomales Bay, California, Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, Paul Engel

Faculty Publications

This paper examines the marine reservoir effect for Tomales Bay, a 25.5-km-long tidal estuary along the northern coast of California. We determined the regional ∆R through radiocarbon (14C) measurements of pre-1950 shells from a museum collection as well as archaeologically recovered shell samples from a historical railroad grade of known construction date. These results are compared against four sets of paired shell and bone samples from two local archaeological sites. Our results indicate little spatial variation along the inner bay, but the proposed ∆R value is lower than those previously reported for nearby areas along the Pacific Coast. We also …

Comment On “Contingent Persistence: Continuity, Change, And Identity Inthe Romanization Debate” By Lara Ghisleni, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

Ghisleni adds an additional voice to the growing chorus of archaeologists dissatisfied with conventional approaches to understanding the material evidence for intercultural entanglements. Particularly troublesome in this regard is the stubborn idea that continuity and change are two mutually exclusive trajectories initiated at the moment of contact. Such formulations lead to a priori assumptions about material culture that limit the ability of archaeologists to trace the complex relationships resulting from such encounters. In seeking to break down the dichotomous thinking that has pervaded the archaeological study of the Roman Empire and its local instantiations, Ghisleni offers an alternative that treats …

Finding Mid-19th Century Native Settlements: Cartographic And Archaeological Evidence From Central California, Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, R. Scott Byram

Faculty Publications

Historical maps have the potential to aid archaeological investigations into the persistence of Native American settlements during the mid-19th century, a time when many Native communities disappear from archaeological view. Focusing on Tomales Bay in central California, we evaluate the usefulness of historical maps as a way to discover and interpret archaeological deposits dating to the period, with the aim of better understanding indigenous patterns of residence at the transition from missionary to settler colonialism. In particular, we focus on diseños and plats created to document Mexican-era land grants as well as early maps produced by the General Land Office …

Special Feature Introduction: Indigenous Persistence In Colonial California, Tsim D. Schneider, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

There are more than one hundred federally recognized Native American tribes found within the present-day borders of California, a roughly equivalent number of indigenous Californian communities who are either unrecognized or currently petitioning for recognition by the United States government, and another eight indigenous reserves just across the international border in Baja California, Mexico. This impressive array of more than 200 Native American communities is not surprising, given what oral narratives, early ethnography, and precontact archaeology tell us about the densely populated sociopolitical landscape comprised of many hundreds of small-scale autonomous tribes that existed before colonization in the late-1700s. Separating …

The Archaeology Of Native American Persistence At Mission San José, Lee M. Panich, Rebecca Allen, Andrew Galvan

Faculty Publications

Archaeological investigations at Mission San José in Fremont, California, have revealed large areas of the mission landscape, including portions of two adobe dwellings in the mission’s Native American neighborhood. Preliminary synthesis of previous and ongoing research at Mission San José focuses on the implications of archaeological evidence for understanding the persistence of indigenous cultural practices under missionization. Materials considered include flaked stone artifacts, shell and glass beads, modified ceramic disks, and faunal and floral remains. Our findings suggest that native people rearticulated various practices within the mission, but did so in ways that were consistent with existing traditions and cultural …

Death, Mourning, And Accommodation In The Missions Of Alta California.In Franciscans And American Indians In Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation,And Resistance, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

Spanish missions are seen by many indigenous people and scholars alike as sites of profound loss. Across the Borderlands of North America, the native individuals and families who entered mission establishments faced terrible and often lethal challenges posed by introduced diseases, strict labor demands, corporal punishment, and unsanitary conditions. In California, as elsewhere, death was part and parcel of the mission experience for many indigenous neophytes as well as the resident Franciscan missionaries. This chapter explores how native people and Franciscans in Alta California negotiated their divergent but deeply held views about what constituted proper death, burial, and mourning practices. …

Heads Or Tails? Modified Ceramic Gaming Pieces From Colonial California, Lee M. Panich, Emilie Lederer, Ryan Phillip, Emily Dylla

Faculty Publications

Modified ceramic disks have been recovered from historic-era sites across the Americas. Small unperforated disks are commonly interpreted as gaming pieces and larger perforated disks are often classified as spindle whorls. Here, we examine these interpretations in light of collections from three colonial-era sites in central California: Mission San Antonio de Padua, Mission San José, and the Rancho San Andrés Castro Adobe. We argue that the small unperforated disks from our study sites were two-sided dice. These gaming pieces facilitated the social cohesion of Native people living in the large, multiethnic Indigenous communities that formed around Spanish colonial missions and …

Islands Within An Almost Island: History, Myth, And Aislamiento In Baja California, Mexico, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

This paper examines the persistent histories and lasting effects of the Baja California peninsula's status as an "almost island." The peninsula is almost an island in so many ways. Its reputation as an island-like entity has also ben strengthened by a longstanding myth that it was, in fact, an actual island. In many senses it was an island - isolated, remote, difficult to envision, understand, and control. Geography and climate played a vital role in all of this, but so, too, did human imagination. The author uses the concept of shima, along with discussions about the dual meanings of the …

The Missions And Camino Real Of Baja California: A Binational View, Julia Bendímez Patterson, Antonio Porcayo Michelini, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

From the end of the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, missionaries from the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican orders founded numerous missions in Baja California. In this article we introduce readers in Alta California to these missions, which along with El Camino Real de las Californias, were the most important institutions used by the Spanish Crown to colonize the Pacific coast of North America.

Exploring Patterns Of Obsidian Conveyance In Baja California, Mexico, Lee M. Panich, Érika Moranchel Mondragón, Antonio Porcayo Michelini

Faculty Publications

The X-ray fluorescence analysis of obsidian artifacts from four study areas in Baja California, Mexico, suggests regional and local patterning in the geological sources used by indigenous hunter-gatherers during the late prehistoric and colonial periods. Obsidian artifacts were typically made from materials from the closest geological source, creating a distinct north-south pattern of obsidian distribution. In the northern region of Baja California, this pattern appears to correspond to ethnographically-documented language boundaries. However, within each study area, particular sites exhibit higher degrees of obsidian source diversity than others—a pattern that may suggest chronological or social variation in access to particular obsidian …

Legality, Race, And Inequality: An Interview With Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola UniversityChicago. Her 2011 book, Labor and Legality, explores the work and social lives ofundocumented busboys in Chicago. Since 2011, Gomberg-Muñoz has been conductingethnographic research with mixed status couples as they go through the process oflegalization; a book manuscript based on that research is in the works.

Mission Santa Clara In A Changing Urban Environment, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

Since its secularization in the 1830s, Mission Santa Clara de Asís and its associated grounds have seen major transformations. These changes include the gradual abandonment of the mission by its native inhabitants, the Californio and early Anglo-American use of mission structures, as well as the founding and growth of Santa Clara College (now Santa Clara University) and the City of Santa Clara. Through the analysis of historic maps, photographs, and archaeological findings, this paper provides an overview of the far-reaching physical changes that have fundamentally altered the original mission-era landscape, including the mission churches, cemeteries, and neophyte village. Information is …

Sustainability, Ideology, And The Politics Of Development In Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

Based upon twelve months of anthropological fieldwork in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico, this article uses political ecology and theoretical work on ideology to examine how local residents use the concept of sustainability to advocate for alternative visions of development. Conceptually, the idea of sustainability has a long, often conflicted history. As political ecologists have pointed out, sustainability can be everything from a tool of dominance and pacification to a strident defense of environment, place, and local rights. Between 2010 and 2012, the residents of Cabo Pulmo waged a campaign against a large-scale tourism development that was perceived as …

Anthropology And Open Access, Jason B. Jackson, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

While still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (OA) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. Despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, OA frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. Cultural Anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. The move to transition it toward a gold OA model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate …

An Anthropocene Without Archaeology—Should We Care?, Todd J. Braje, Jon M. Erlandson, C. Melvin Aikens, Tim Beach, Scott Fitzpatrick, Sara Gonzalez, Douglas J. Kennett, Patrick V. Kirch, Gyoung-Ah Lee, Kent G. Lightfoot, Sarah B. Mcclure, Lee M. Panich, Torben C. Rick, Anna C. Roosevelt, Tsim D. Schneider, Bruce Smith, Melinda A. Zeder

Faculty Publications

For more than a decade, a movement has been gathering steam among geoscientists to designate an Anthropocene Epoch and formally recognize that we have entered a new geological age in which Earth’s systems are dominated by humans. Chemists, climatologists, and other scientists have entered the discussion, and there is a growing consensus that we are living in the Anthropocene. Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (2002a, 2002b; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) coined the term, but the idea that humans are a driver of our planet’s climate and ecosystems has much deeper roots. Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani wrote of the “anthropozoic …

Savage Minds Interview: Kristina Killgrove, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

Kristina Killgrove is a biological anthropologist at the University of West Florida. Her research focuses on theorizing migration in antiquity and on understanding urban development and collapse through the analysis of human skeletal remains. She works primarily in the classical world, attempting to learn about the daily lives of the lower classes in Imperial Rome through osteological and biochemical analyses, but she has also worked on questions of population interaction in the contact-period southeastern U.S.and in Medieval Germany. A strong commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching help her bridge the sometimes large divide between classics and anthropology.For more about Killgrove's …

Savage Minds Interview: Sarah Kendzior, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

Sarah Kendzior is a writer for Al Jazeera English. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University and researches the political effects of digital media in the former USSR. You can find her work at sarahkendzior.com,and on Twitter: @sarahkendzior

Cultures In Contact At Colony Ross, Kent G. Lightfoot, Sara Gonzalez, Darren Modzelewski, Lee M. Panich, Otis Parrish, Tsim Schneider

Faculty Publications

For thousands of years before the coming of Europeans, Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples inhabited the coastal lands north of San Francisco Bay. Like many other California Indians, they were hunter-gatherers who harvested wild plants and animals from the sea and land for food, medicine, clothing, housing material, and ceremonial regalia. Villages nestled along protected coastal embayments and ridge tops of the Northern Coast Ranges mountains contained tule-thatched or redwood bark houses, ceremonial structures (round houses), sweat houses, dance enclosures, and extramural cooking and work areas. Large villages served as the political centers for broader communities of dispersed family …

Opening Anthropology: An Interview With Keith Hart At Savage Minds, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

This interview is part of an ongoing series about open access (OA), publishing,communication, and anthropology. The first interview in this series was with Jason Baird Jackson. The second interview was with Tom Boellstorff. The third installment of this OA series is with Keith Hart (See Part 1, Part 2,and Part 3on Savage Minds). Full text also posted onThe Memory Bank.

Publishing Without Perishing: Sharing Ideas & Challenging The Closed System Of Academic Anthropology, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

Why do we publish anthropology? Do we publish to communicate our ideas, or to move up the ranks of academia? We all know the basic narrative: In order to land a job and move up the socio-economic ladder of academicanthropology, we all need to publish. As the saying goes: publish or perish. So everyone — from graduate students onward — joins in and perpetuates this particular academic habitus. But is the current system working? We may all be publishing (or working toward it), but that does not mean that we have really avoided the “perish” part of the equation. The …

Opening Our Anthropological Conversations: An Interview With Tom Boellstorff, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

I had the chance to conduct an email-based interview with Tom Boellstorff during this past month to explore some of his views about Open Access (hereafter OA) publishing in anthropology.

Ryan Anderson: First of all, thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Tom. Here at Savage Minds we write about Open Access (OA) a lot, and many of our contributors seem to be in agreement about the need to look into alternative publishing options. But not everyone knows about OA or is in agreement with the push to head in that direction, and this includes many people who …

Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview With Jason Baird Jackson, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

During the last few weeks I had the chance to conduct an email based interview with Jason Baird Jackson about Open Access (OA), academic publishing, and anthropology...

Landscapes Of Wealth & Desire, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

This paper explores the historical background to a proposed study of political disputes over the value of large-scale tourism development in Baja California Sur. The paper starts with a review of anthropological discussions of value — focusing on the work of Kluckhohn, Graeber, Elyachar and Appadurai. The aim is to use an anthropological approach to value to place current conflicts over land and resources arising from recent developments within a historical perspective. The paper then investigates how actors in different time periods have contributed to collective and often contradictory constructions of the area as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, …

Franz Boas: Geographer/Anthropologist, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

The separation between anthropology and geography is a factor of time, and the divergent meanderings of disciplinary histories. As Larry Grossman once argued, “Cultural geographers and anthropologists are like brothers separated in infancy and taught to speak different languages” (1977:126). In many ways, this is quite true. Anthropology and geography actually do share many roots and intellectual origins, even if these connections aren't exactly emphasized in the respective disciplinary histories. Interestingly, if there is one crucial common ancestor that American geographers and anthropologists share, it is none other than one of the icons of North American anthropology: Franz Boas.

Negotiating History And Attending To The Future: Perceptions Among And Of Malaiyaha Tamils In Sri Lanka, Mythri Jegathesan

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Spanish Missions In The Indigenous Landscape:A View From Mission Santa Catalina,Baja California, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

Mission Santa Catalina was founded on the margins of the Spanish colonial frontier in northern Baja California, but over time it became an important place in the indigenous landscape of the region. Dominican friars established the mission at a crossroads of native interaction, and recent archaeological, archival, and ethnographic research suggests that indigenous mission neophytes continued to engage in dynamic social and economic relationships with other native groups throughout the colonial period. At the same time, however, the diverse native peoples who lived at Santa Catalina formed new bonds to each other and to the lands around the mission itself. …

Open Access And Academic Publishing: An Interview With Colleen Morgan, Ryan B. Anderson

Faculty Publications

The following is from an email-based interview with Colleen Morgan, who runs the blog MiddleSavagery. These days I have a lot of questions about the direction(s) of anthropology, especially when it comes to the publication and dissemination of the information that anthropologists produce.

Total Station Mapping: Practical Examples From Alta And Baja California, Tsim D. Schneider, Lee M. Panich

Faculty Publications

The use of electronic total data stations for mapping archaeological sites is examined through two California case studies. Mission Santa Catalina, located in the high desert of Baja California, and a cluster of three shell mounds, located in a forest in the San Francisco Bay area, represent two different examples of organizing and implementing a mapping program using a total station. In this article, we will discuss the basic use of total stations for mapping archaeological sites and provide an overview of the process of creating digital maps from data obtained using a total station. The two case studies will …

Iran, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

Iran lies between Iraq and, further north, Turkey to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea border Iran to the north, and thee Persian Gulf to the south. Iran covers 636,293 square miles.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many people lived by herding animals. Some of the Kurds and the Shahsevan in the northwest, Qashqai, Bakhtiary, Lurs, and Kamseh in the southwest, Baluch in the southeast, and Turkmen in the northeast lived in nomadic camps, traveling with their animals in search of water and pastures. Beginning in the …

The Power Paradox In Muslim Women’S Majales: North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals As Sites Of Contestation Over Religious Politics, Ethnicity, And Gender, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

During revolutions, rebellions, and movements, women are often called on to serve contradictory roles. They are asked to perform workpolitical, communicative, networking, recruiting, military, manual - that generally goes beyond the society's usual gender restrictions. At the same time, women serve as symbols of movement identity, unity, commitment, and righteous entitlement. To fit into this idealized symbolic image, individual women must fulfill often "traditional" or even exaggerated "feminine" behavioral and attitudinal requirements, such as loyalty, obedience, selflessness, sacrifice, and "proper" deportment: all in all, they are to put aside any personal aspirations and wishes for self-fulfillment and give their all …