Sunk

In September 1892 The San Francisco Morning Call published a series of articles that chronicled the events leading to and after the excavation of an ancient shellmound at the southern edge of the city of Alameda. The first article, titled Graves of Aborigines, included bits of the city’s history, information about the owner of the parcel where the mound was located and how the top was leased and used to grow vegetables. Historical maps of Alameda show the southern section of the town as only sparsely populated and the mound must have been a prominent landmark.

"Sinkers used for fishing"

San Francisco Morning Call, Volume 72

September 26, 1892

Credit: Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, UC Riverside

The article was written by James H. Griffes, who had recently moved to Alameda from the East Coast and was aware that the mound was not a natural feature and that residents looted large numbers of artifacts in the years after the edge of the mound was clipped for road construction. Importantly, Griffes claimed that there were two mounds close to each other (a situation that would resemble the one at Emeryville) but the smallest of the two hillocks had been obliterated by housing developments. Now the city had plans for more roads and houses and thus seemed clear that by Christmas 1892 also the main shellmound would be gone for good. That notion set Griffes in action: he felt that the mound was too important for California ancient history and at least the artifacts needed to be rescued before it was too late. Griffes also planned for those artifacts to be housed and curated by the California Historical Society whose members, in fact, apprised him about the ancient Indian village.

How he convinced the newspaper to get involved is speculative but after obtaining a permit from the landowner and the lessess, Griffes hired the Aradas, a father and son, with the former claiming previous experience in archaeology both in California and Peru, and in the early afternoon they pushed their spades in the soft anthropogenic soil. As expected, the excavation immediately uncovered a number of ancient skeletons and the journalist showed surprise in the ghastly discovery and left out valuable details about their context in all his articles. The writer noted, however, that the bones were brittle and they could hardly be touched without turning to powder, that some individuals were buried in a sitting position and that some were buried without their crania. Mortars and pestles were also unearthed together with abundant faunal remains, projectile points and large adobe fragments although the former were discarded almost immediately. The day after, a follow up article titled Antiquarian Treasures included a narrative of the second day of excavations and while the tone remained rather enthusiastic it is also clear that the novelty of field archaeology was rapidly dwindling. To the modern day archaeologist two details stand out in the article, one individual was allegedly buried with a metal axe and a whole pottery vessel is featured in one illustration. Both items would be evidence that the Alameda village was still actively used by Bay Area Indians after a contact with the early Mexican and Spanish explorers, a marked difference from the mounds at Berkeley, Emeryville, Richmond and San Mateo that were abandoned decades or centuries before contact. 

Hearst Museum 1-4656

Small mortar

California, Alameda County, Shellmound in Alameda

Collected by John J. Rivers, 1892. Older Collections of the University

Hot weather, fatigue and the sheer number of relics convinced Griffes to prematurely end his own excavations. The same night, however, he called the California Academy of Sciences and asked them if they were willing to take over and on September 13th, Call's readers were informed that following a quick visit by the director and the curator, the Academy agreed to take over the remaining days on the permit obtained by The Call and would immediately commence additional excavations, which were expected to achieve even greater results. At the same time, now fully persuaded of the scientific value of his excavation, Griffes closed the article voicing his regrets about the final destination of the items he collected. The relics were originally thought to be curated by the California Historical Society but he now called the suggestion unadvisable because:

The Society exists scarcely but in name at present, it has no permanent museum or exhibition and would hardly know what to do with the valuable collection. [...] The Call's only wish in the matter is to dispose of the precious relics in such a manner as will make them of the greatest service to the greatest number. 

Griffes wrote that steps would be taken to reach out to the State University in Berkeley.

The Academy excavations were allegedly very successful and two days later another article was written highlighting the wonderful items that were collected and quickly transported to San Francisco; Dr. Harkell, director of the academy, was less enthusiastic, however, and he surprisingly depreciated the value of the mound with words that today read rather short sighted: 

This is simply an Indian mound, as The Call has characterized it, but, though very interesting, its relics are not so much of scientific value as of antiquarian interest. 

Harkell’s tepid endorsement notwithstanding, Griffes was successful in reaching out to the University and the upcoming visit by the curator of the museum was later announced with palpable enthusiasm.

Hearst Museum 1-4597
Sinker
California, Alameda County, Shellmound in Alameda
Collected by John J. Rivers, 1892. Older Collections of the University

John James Rivers was an entomologist and he had been the curator of the collections at Berkeley since at least 1873. Back then, the position was not considered particularly prestigious given that it was listed at the very end of the staff directory, after the phone operator and just above the janitorial team. By 1879 it was listed above the gardener and the University Press editor. Yet, the university was in possession of thousands of objects encompassing many disciplines including geology, biology, agriculture, history and anthropology, he was the sole curator and there was no dedicated building. In spite of his academic background, by 1892 J. J. Rivers was recognized as one of the finest antiquarians and experts in ancient Indian objects. During his visit he displayed that expertise by pointing out that the Aradas surely missed many less evident artifacts and while Griffes tried to assure him of the carefulness placed in the excavation Rivers walked around the spoil heap, kicked the soil with his toe and picked up a stone that once brushed from soil turned out to be shaped and perforated. That day a small crowd had gathered at the mound and it was following the university curate’s visit and that gave him an audience for sharing some knowledge about such objects and their use.

That is a sinker. The Indians who once inhabited this mound were great fishermen. They needed sinkers for their lines and nets. They had no lead and so used cobblestones. This sinker was used at the bottom of the line, as you see by the hole in the top of the stone. That hole was drilled by the Indians. They used a different kind of stone to tie on to the nets they cast. Here is one of them.

As he spoke, Rivers kneeled down, picked up and brushed another stone which, to the delight of the onlookers, had groves on two sides. A short time later all the objects from the Call’s excavation were packed and hauled away.

After a few days, on September 26th, the official letter of acceptance from Rivers on behalf of the regents was published. To the benefit of the readers, Rivers praised the Call’s research, listed a number of animals found during the diggings, highlighted some important items and wrote about the use of mortars for processing nuts and, again, about the fishing tools. The final words he offered, however, were only slightly more passionate than Harkell’s:

The relics are of the usual type of shellmound examples. All the Alameda mounds had been superficially examined and collected over.

The sudden flurry of activity around the ancient mound had come to an end.

Hearst Museum 1-4762

Sinker

California, Alameda County, Shellmound in Alameda

Collected by John J. Rivers, 1892. Older Collections of the University

Rivers was correct with regard to Alameda County as many ancient Indian mounds in the county were well-known; portions of the mound at Emeryville had been chipped away since 1850, the same for the West Berkeley and the Strawberry Creek villages. Only a handful of the thousands of ancient artifacts removed from them arrived at Berkeley but, in his care, Rivers also had objects and skeletal remains from other counties surrounding the Bay and he was definitely well positioned for learning first hand about the material culture of Bay Area Indians.

One important and sizable collection that had been donated to the university at least two decades earlier originated from the work of Charles D. Voy, a businessman who used his considerable financial resources to travel and collect natural and ethnographic specimens from many parts of the world. Later in life he dedicated his efforts to the excavation of mounds in San Francisco, Vallejo, Rio Vista, Sausalito, and Brooklyn (now part of West Oakland). The latter was probably very large since it was the only shellmound noted in a map produced by the State Geological Survey of 1874 but according to Nelson’s survey of 1909 not much was left of it, like many other mounds it had been leveled to make room for housing and the railroad tracks for the bustling Oakland port. The obliteration of California ancient history was gaining speed.

Hearst Museum 1-16414

Short pestle

California, Alameda County, Brooklyn Shellmound

Collected by Charles D. Voy, 1872. Older Collections of the University

The Call published Voy’s death notice in 1894, the same year it printed a short announcement that the Academy had organized a symposium about prehistoric mounds in North America and Arabia; a lecture by Dr. Hittell specific to the Alameda mound was advertised and readers were suggested to participate. Like Voy, however, James Griffes was no longer around to attend the event: he had moved to South California shortly after the atrocious murder of his wife in a San Francisco saloon on June 28, 1893. This story came to fame again in recent times with the proliferation of podcasts and blogs dedicated to unsolved or particularly gruesome murders.

Years went by with no updates on the Alameda mound until 1908 when the city bought part of the mound parcel to establish Lincoln Park and while preparing the grounds the workmen apparently discovered more than 400 burials and countless artifacts some of which were transferred to the newly established Alameda Public Library but, if they did, I doubt that they could still be there. In 1911 the city accepted the suggestion to place a stone monument and a plaque commemorating the ancient mound in the park and it took three years to accomplish it. The unveiling ceremony in 1914 was attended by anthropology professor Thomas T. Waterman who was accompanied by Ishi, the Yahi man who was living at the University since three years earlier and was quite famous. The Call had featured him many times over the years and those articles have a great historical value for the story of the man then considered the last Indian of California. But no reporter for the Call was present on that day as the newspaper ceased publication in 1913 after 23 years of history. 

Hearst Museum 15-21019

Unveiling of Indian Monument in Lincoln Park; Ishi in background

California, Alameda County, Shellmound in Alameda

Photo by: Copa de Oro Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1914

J. J. Rivers left the University in 1895, Ishi died in 1916 and James Griffes in 1919, with them the story of the excavation at the Alameda mound lost all direct witnesses. Articles from the Oakland Tribune twenty years later (mid 1930’s)  indicate that nobody could tell exactly where many objects and burials removed from the mound over the years ended up. In fact, it is likely that the Academy excavation was lost in the 1906 earthquake, the Alameda Library called for private collectors to donate their objects but few appeared to be inclined, and even what is left here at the University seems too sparse to reflect the alleged number of items removed in 1892.

Lincoln Park is still there today but the monument was vandalized causing the plaque to be removed in 1981. It was inscribed with a poem written by Mary Cameron Benjamin that tellingly ended with the words Lest we forget - lest we forget.

Accent

March 12th, a student, carrying a brand new trowel, bent down, observing something unusual on the ground. After a second's contemplation, he got up. "No, it's nothing," he said, then walked a few feet more before he bent over again. This time he called to a friend for help. They both began loosening the soil with their trowels. All over an area of a quarter mile, groups of men and women were doing the same thing.

These are the opening sentences in the notebook of A. Neal Hand, a Berkeley undergraduate student enrolled in Anthropology 195 in the Spring of 1958. In addition to the weekly lectures, the students were required to participate in field activities during weekends and for them professor René Millon had planned a survey of part of Sonoma County followed by two months of excavation in a prehistoric mound in Contra Costa. The initial survey was conceived to cover sites that were already known but some students took the initiative to record additional interesting locations like the old adobe shack featured in the photo below. Like many times before, at the end of the quarter all the objects collected by the students were cataloged under one accession number and the documentation filed in a binder bearing the same number. A peculiarity of these accessions is that in addition to the standard feature, stratigraphy and burial forms, the binders sometimes contained the student notebooks and, when required for their final grade, a more comprehensive paper, photos and drawings.

a student standing in front of the adobe shack, Sonoma County
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives
Photo by Josepha Haveman, March 1958

Since the early fifties, the popularity of archaeology classes at Berkeley increased year after year and courses similar to Anthro 195 were then scheduled  at least every other semester or quarter, early on in conjunction with projects organized by the California Archaeological Survey and after 1961 under the auspices of the Department and the Archaeological Research Facility. The last group of undergraduate students to participate in a field class, enrolled in the Spring 1973 and excavated a site in Napa County under the direction of Thomas Hester. In two decades, students went as far as Nevada and Oregon, although over time, some places became more popular than others: the Philippi Ranch site was excavated for eight consecutive classes between 1950 and 1954; the Hotchkiss Mound was visited multiple times between 1953 and 1968; Napa Valley, with its numerous sites, was the most rewarding area in terms of sheer number of objects collected and accessioned by the museum. Undergraduate students are currently credited for about 30.000 catalog records, a number that is destined to grow as we continue working on the archives and database.

students working in a trench at the Philippi site, Fall 1951
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives
Photo by Clement Meighan

Few months ago we had the chance to look into one archaeological collection with a long and convoluted history. Twenty five boxes of materials excavated in Napa Valley in the Springs of 1969 and 1970 under the direction of James Bennyhoff were delivered to the museum in 1985, via the University of Texas. 1970 was a seminal year for political and student unrest and 1970 - yet unbeknownst to him - was also going to be Bennyhoff last teaching experience at Berkeley, both events contributed to the tortuous and long way the material came back to California. My colleagues in Registration and Collections are taking care of the catalog and proper storage of this large assemblage, I am looking at the box of documents that came with it. What I found where few yellowish maps, two or three rolls of black and white film, few photographs, and two large binders of students field notes for a total of 1600 pages! So far, I haven't had the time to sit down and read them all but I have digitized them and so they can be used in the cataloging of the materials. I did, however, have the time to skim through some pages knowing by experience that, aside of the more professionally written notes, undergraduate students often added personal thoughts, not necessarily about the archaeological work per se, but also their feeling about it, about their companions, their professors and other aspects of life. Here are some excerpts from those diaries:

Another problem that made itself felt right away, is one of divided attention. There is so much to do, measure, record, draw map, photograph, look for surface material, listen to instruction, etc. etc.

Few days later, the same student grumbled that they couldn't go back to a previous locations to do a better job with their now superior skills. Another student in 1970 wrote at the beginning of the term:

The digging should be quite exciting. The valley is very beautiful and the weather will hopefully remain hot. The ratio of girls to fellows is about 2 or 3 to 1. I must keep my eyes open and hands off(?).

To which prof. Bennyhoff added in pen while grading the paper: you're kidding... Another student described the work done with her daily team and wrote:

We have named our pit "Pit Excedrin" with an as yet to be assigned number; the pit is a headache but we're trying to keep our senses of humor.

On a more somber note, some diaries have brief mentions of the events at Kent State and how UCB responded by cancelling most classes. Some students continued to go to NAP-57 on a volunteer basis (and their paper did not receive a grade) but the mood and the energy are not at their tops and some feel the excavation is now a lost cause. On May 24, 1970, two weeks after the killings at Kent State, one student wrote:

Nothing was done in N8-W3 [a test unit]. I had intended to do some work on my own in the pit but it was too god-awful hot, and I was in a general state of depression, so I did nothing.

That student is now a friend of mine, Preston Staley; he didn't go on to a career in archaeology but he came back to the museum some years ago and volunteered his time on various projects I had with the Egyptian collections. Over the year he told me many stories about the department and the museum in the late sixties and early seventies and they were all very interesting. I regret starting the work on Nap-57 after he left us as he would have been a valuable help.

Most students wrote a final page summarizing the work they had done during the dig, providing some results and personal observations. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many students walked away from the experience with little intention of continuing a career in archaeology and here is what some wrote:

Thus the value of my first digging experience lies not in what kinds of archaeological theories were or were not borne out by the excavation. rather, the actual taste of digging itself was of the greatest enjoyment to me. Archaeology had always seemed pretty dull to me, but after even a brief initial stint at it, I realize why people become so dedicated to it and have so much fun at it.

I will come away from this dig with mixed feelings, some disillusionment and much experience. It is difficult, for me at least, to grasp the total meaning of the activity I have submerged myself in for some 9 weeks. I wonder now, as I have wondered many times throughout the quarter, whether or not I will be able to stand the pace and exacting diligence it takes to be a professional anthropologist.

There are several extenuating circumstances that will have an effect on the interpretation of Nap 57. Some of these circumstances have to do with the structure of the class, and inevitably the organization of the university, and the many problems that rock its serenity. However this is no place for such discussions, I must only assume that they are taken into consideration. The circumstances that regard the site Napa 57 are the fact that it was pot hunted in 1930, it has been plowed and is now a walnut orchard, all of which devalue its importance as a site and put question on the information that may be accumulated here.

Anthro 133 students weeding the surface of the Peripoli site.
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives

Photo by Donna Schmit, May 1969

Unfortunately, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to compile a comprehensive list of all the students who attended these classes in two decades but many of their names remain as signatures on the feature and burial sheets they filled while in the field. I admit I fancy searching the internet to see if any of them actually continued to study archaeology and made a career within the discipline. And I found many: among others, Clement Meighan, Sonia Ragir, Sylvia Broadbent and Gordon Grosscup had successful teaching careers; Frank Norick, Eugene Prince and Albert Elsasser ended up working for many years in this museum while Josepha Haveman, Patrick Hallinan and others experienced a shorter period of employment at Berkeley. In the final years of field classes, it is possible that some students found themselves working for CRM companies that started to flourish in those years rather than continue studying for an academic career.
Back in the Spring of 1958, a week of heavy rain ended the survey for the Anthro 195 class and only four students volunteered to drive to Sonoma County the last Sunday of April. One of them was A. Neal Hand and he described in his journal the final event of the survey.

Bennyhoff led this group into an orchard made swamplike by the rain. As one stepped through the ooze he made deep puddles.
A farmer stomped out of a nearby house and skated angrily down the dirt road in the pouring rain. Bennyhoff went to meet him.
"Yew git off this land!"
"We were just looking for..."
"Git off!"
"... the owner. Where is he?"
"Ah ain't sayin."
"What's your name?"
"Ain't sayin."
"... we're from the University of California and are surveying this site"
"In this rain?"
"Won't you tell us where the owner is so we can get permission to continue?"
"No!... Well he's in New York"
"Won't you tell me your name?"
"NO! Now git!"
"The University of California won't appreciate this"
"Sonny, I've been to school, too. Now git!"
The group went.

The above is not the sole attempt to render one person accent or speech to be found in the museum archives. In 1937, Ernest N. Johnson, an amateur collector from Stockton, corresponded with Edward Gifford about his dealings with other collectors of ancient artifacts. One of them, an Italian farmer, had a brief conversation with Johnson about stone pestles found on his property in the Delta and Johnson tried to reproduce that conversation "faithfully":

Yes, we finda one tom-tom; you know, biga rounda longa rock, likea clob, de indian fighta wit. Boy, you hitta one man data tom-tom, breaka da head, sure.

Mindful of my ex wife permanent frustration with my language skills, the day I found the letter I asked my friend Martina: do I sound like this to you? Her answer was a reassuring 'not really' but a few weeks later I was exchanging few words with another colleague about my vacations in Italy when, suddenly, she cheerfully said: oh, your accent got thicker!




students working and engaging with locals at the Hotchkiss Mound.

Archaeologist Richard Ambro☨ looking at the camera.
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives

Photo by C. Clelow, June 1966

Slab

Philip Mill Jones may well be the least celebrated archaeologist of the early age of the discipline in California. Few months ago I gave a small presentation about the museum and I learned that many graduate students were not familiar with his name. Indeed in 1956 Heizer and Elsasser had noted that while the Uhle's (Peru) and the Reisner's (Egypt) collections became well-known among scholars and students, Jones contribution had been (as of 1956) little recognized. 

Between 1899 and 1901, P. M. Jones was appointed by Mrs. Hearst to conduct field investigation, mostly in California, but in other parts of Western North America as well. Jones was a medical doctor, not an archaeologist. Perhaps for that reason he was primarily interested in ancient Indian burials but he had a keen sense of the scientific nature of his enterprise and pioneered the use of photographs and field notes in California archaeology.

Adobe Holes; top of Mound # 5, showing trench commenced. Man at extreme end of mound

Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives.
Photo by Philip M. Jones, 1901

Jones spent the early months of 1901 on Santa Rosa Island where he investigated thirty five ancient sites that resulted in vast archaeological assemblages now curated in Berkeley*. He wasn't the first one but most of the earlier collectors could be classified simply as looters. Many other archaeological expeditions expanded on Jones' findings in the following decades but a comprehensive body had not yet been produced. Indeed, in his review of Archaeological Investigations on Santa Rosa Island in 1901, William J. Wallace hinted that the editors [Heizer and Elsasser] could have done better justice to Jones' collections from Santa Rosa Island by reevaluating them in light of more recent discoveries rather than limit themselves to transcribe his diaries and field notes. These manuscripts are incredibly valuable and yet disappointing from a modern archaeological standpoint given the lack of drawings and more detailed photographs. They are, however, very descriptive of all aspects of the expeditions. Among other details we know that the crew often operated under bad weather conditions and that Jones himself was frequently feeling sick from cold and flu. Rain, strong winds and fog are mentioned often in his pages. One day in February the crew couldn't leave for the fields because the fog was so thick they could not locate their horses! Many years ago I found myself in a foggy situation when my teammates had to walk next to the car to help me drive along a narrow and steep trail on our way to a cave.

Jones' Horses in Guadalupe, California

Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives.
Photo by Philip M. Jones (?), 1901

I personally find unfortunate that many years later (1972) Robert Heizer decided to dust off Jones' collection to produce another small volume titled California oldest historical relic? The subject of this little pamphlet was a stone slab collected on Santa Rosa Island, which he postulated could be Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo gravestone. It isn't. The main argument is that Cabrillo died on San Miguel Island and he was likely buried there. Afterward the fleet sailed north and reached Oregon before returning to Mexico ending an expedition that most contemporaries considered a failure. They didn't return to Santa Rosa Island: how did the slab travel there?
Philip Mills Jones was not aware of the carvings; he collected this and other similar slabs and thought they were produced and used by Indians, not White explorers or early settlers. Would he collect the slab if he thought it belong to Cabrillo's grave? There is no answer to that question but Jones wasn't necessarily interested in historic, non native, sites. He was also not a scam artist and it is hard to imagine why, in his long prologue about the discovery of the stone, Heizer hinted at the possibility that the slab could be part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by Jones. It wasn't, of course, and his legacy did not deserve the casting of such doubts many years after his death.

Hearst Museum 1-5086
slab
Southern California, Channel Islands, Santa Rosa Island
Collected by Philip M. Jones, 1901

* Most of the Jones's collection from Santa Rosa Island was hurrily deaccesioned in 2019 and it's no longer curated at the Hearst Museum.

Lump

Eugene A. Golomshtok came to the United States from Russia in 1918, perhaps because of the recent revolution, and received his bachelor degree at Berkeley in December 1922. Since the Fall 1921 Golomshtok is seldom employed by the museum and the records show that he worked in Monterey, Tehama and Shasta counties where he collected archaeological assemblages complemented by a small selection of ethnographic objects and photographs. Some of his early findings were noted by Alfred Kroeber who wrote to the landowner in 1922:
"I was greatly interested in some broken pieces of pottery that Mr. Golomshtok found in Cypress Point. It is too crude and irregular to be of American or of Mexican make, and on the other hand, there has been no previous authentic report of pottery having been manufactured by the Indians of the region"
Despite Kroeber's interest, Golomshtok experience at Berkeley ended in the fall of 1925 and the museum didn't undertake any further archaeological work in the sites he discovered.

Hearst Museum 1-23591

lump

California, Monterey County, CA-Mnt-159

Collected by Eugene A. Golomshtok, 1921

Hearst Museum 1-23556

spear point, broken

California, Monterey County, CA-Mnt-159

Collected by Eugene A. Golomshtok, 1921

An interesting contribution for the Day of Archaeology 2014 said that Golomshtok was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Museum from 1930 to around 1938, a period he used to travel several times back to Russia on archaeological and ethnographic expeditions. Pre-war times were a period of turmoil in Europe and despite more than one agreement between Germany and Russia, he was no longer able to secure a working visa after 1934.

He spent the following years reading all possible Russian archaeological literature available in the United States and, in 1938, published The Old Stone Age in European Russia that he hoped to be especially useful to those who did not know the Russian language. Golomshtok's thorough survey was highly praised by many reviewers, notably by Sir Gordon Child, but surprisingly it remained the last of his publications. Eugene Golomshtok died in 1950.

Pipe

This is not a pipe.

Hearst Museum 1-243044
pipe
United States; California
Collected by Paul Ruedrich

Bones

When the Department of Anthropology was established in 1901, Professor F. W. Putnam and Professor J. C. Merriam had already conceived the Early Man project; which aimed to add more data to the understanding of the timing of the initial peopling of California and the New World. Before the advent of radiocarbon or other absolute dating methods, the age of Paleolithic sites was inferred through the presence of ancient animals, great depth of the deposit from the surface, or the perceived crudeness of ancient tools.
Between 1899 and 1902, P. M. Jones worked in the Tulare Valley and the Coast between Santa Barbara and Monterey. Putnam, W. J. Sinclair and Merriam studied the Calaveras caves where there was a possible association between extinct fauna and evidence of human activities.
The McCloud River area and Shasta county were also considered important due to earlier discoveries of potentially very old remains "at least several thousands of years." The Department of Anthropology sent two archaeologists in 1902, E. L. Furlong and Sinclair, along with Merriam to excavate a trench in the lower chamber of Potter Creek Cave. The cave is located along the eastern edge of the McCloud River at about 1,500 feet above sea level. It is one of the earliest and most important prehistoric locations investigated by the Hearst Museum. The deposit extended more than 80 inches below surface, an indication the archaeologists took for the great antiquity of the lowest levels. Nearby Samwel Cave was also partially explored the same year. By 1904, Potter Creek and Samwel caves were timely published and Putnam was already looking forward new discoveries:

Besides these two caves there are many other localities, both caves and rock-shelters, where remains occur in this region. Their study offers perhaps the best opportunity that there is for determining the time human first entered this region.



Hearst Museum 1-24327
polished bone
California, Shasta county, Potter Creek Cave
Collected by E. L. Furlong and W. J. Sinclair, 1902




Hearst Museum 1-24325
polished bone
California, Shasta county, Potter Creek Cave
Collected by E. L. Furlong and W. J. Sinclair, 1902

By 1903-1904, Furlong was already a veteran of the archaeological excavations for the museum. By then he had been involved in the excavations of the West Berkeley Shellmound (CA-Ala-307), Hawver Cave (CA-Eld-16) and the Emeryville Shellmound (CA-Ala-309) among other sites. He didn't write or publish much, but left very good notes and drawings of his excavations. The Hearst accounts for about 800 records collected by Furlong.

Tranquillity

The California Central Valley is one place I truly enjoy to visit. The flat landscape, the humid summer heat, old villages and isolated country houses remind me of the Po' river Valley, in north Italy, where I grew up. A few months ago I traveled through the Central Valley on my way back from the annual meeting of the Society for California Archaeology. A few miles to the north of San Joaquin lies the small town of Tranquillity and I stopped there for gasoline and a break from driving. The town, true to its name, was almost deserted and eerily quiet.













outskirts of Tranquillity, CA (2014)

In 1939, Gordon W. Hewes and William C. Massey walked through the fields around Tranquillity as part of the archaeological survey of the central San Joaquin Valley. They came across a small exposed surface where stone tools and other implements were in close proximity to the remains of large mammals like horses, antelopes, elks, bison and camelops. The discovery of Tranquillity stirred a lot of interest around the country because such old sites are very rare, especially in California. North American camels became extinct around 11.000 years ago; Paleolithic hunters accelerated a process that started with the warmer post-glacial weather and the gradual disappearance of the grassland these large animals thrived on.
The climate in this part of the Central Valley is similar to the Mojave desert, low annual rainfall and shrub vegetation with sparse trees along sloughs and swamps. Under the shade of these trees a small group of hunter-gatherers established a small hut perhaps as far back as the early Holocene. Then, for thousands of years, they regularly went back to this corner of the Valley to gather seeds, tubers and grasses, they hunted animals of all sizes though not many birds nor fish. Eventually they built more permanent houses and stayed there for longer periods of time.
Perhaps they didn't kill the camelops and the proximity with the tools is coincidental; an on-going research project is expected to add some clear chronological information. Even if they didn't have to engage those large creatures the people that lived at Tranquillity had their fair share of hard work: fractured ribs, hernias and various forms of arthritis tell a story of abundance that did not come without an effort.
Below are four spear points from the Tranquillity site. The third from the left was fractured by an impact, carried back to the village and discarded in the fire. The reddish coloration is due to the intense heat.

Hearst Museum 1-61917, 1-61918, 1-61919, 1-61920
Points
California, Fresno county, Tranquillity site
Collected by Gordon W. Hewes, 1942