Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2022 - 60

LETTER FROM THE BAY AREA
An obsidian point from Mission Santa Clara is evidence that the material was still
traded across California well into the Spanish mission period.
1840s-on the Pacific coast north of
San Francisco. To keep their impact
on the land as minimal as possible, the
team used ground-penetrating radar
to identify the heart of the settlement.
They then collected material from the
surface and from a handful of small
test excavation pits.
Radiocarbon dating showed that
the site was occupied beginning 5,000
years ago and continuing through the
mission period and beyond, contradicting
the idea that the missions had
rounded up or killed everyone living in
the region. And just as at China Camp,
the nature of the artifacts at Toms
Point provided evidence that Native
culture was far from extinct. Well into
the 1840s, nearly 60 years after Spanish
missionaries first started pushing
Coast Miwok people into missions,
and just a few years before California
became a state, people were crafting
discarded glass bottles into cutting
implements and metal spikes into fishhooks
while continuing to make stone
tools. " We can see that these technological
traditions persisted, " Panich
says. " The assumption always was that
metal tools were better than stone
and had replaced them as soon as they
were introduced. But people clearly
didn't give stone tools up. "
M
60
ore recently, Panich's focus has
turned back to the missions
themselves. Because of
construction work to expand Santa
Clara's campus, archaeologists were
able to finally take a close look at the
part of the mission where Indigenous
people lived. Their findings showed
that people there were applying
traditional techniques to new
materials in the shadow of the mission
church. For example, there, too, they
repurposed bottle glass and porcelain
sherds to make arrow points. " People
had access to new materials, " Panich
says, " but were using them as ironic
commentary: 'Here's your trash and
we're going to make something to
shoot you with.' "
170-year-old building. Opening a box
full of black flakes stored in plastic
bags, Panich explains that by analyzing
chemicals in the volcanic glass,
archaeologists can trace the tools back
to their source and show that, alongside
the tool technology itself, precontact
trade networks persisted into the
mission period. " Trade networks didn't
just disappear, " Panich says. " Native
people were still able to obtain these
materials. " At Santa Clara, he found
obsidian cutting tools from the height
of the mission period that were sourced
from the Napa Valley, nearly 100 miles
to the north, and even from the eastern
slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains,
nearly 300 miles away.
The excavations also revealed
evidence that the Ohlone and other
Mission San Juan Bautista is one of California's best-preserved missions.
During the 2012 preconstruction
excavations, archaeologists unearthed
thousands of mission-era obsidian
flakes, more stone tools than
archaeologists had collected in nearly
a century of Bay Area archaeology.
Along with hundreds of other artifacts
from the dig, these are now stored
in a campus warehouse and at the
university's Community Heritage Lab,
an archaeology facility housed in a
Indigenous people continued to
practice traditional religious beliefs at
the missions. Pits containing burned
shell beads, boot spurs, and other
personal possessions- " high-status
stuff, " Panich says-showed that
mourning ceremonies that included
such offerings continued even after
Catholic friars banned them. " People
(continued on page 62)
ARCHAEOLOGY * May/June 2022
Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2022

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