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.

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

Archaeology in the 19th century

We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put his rude and ineffective weapons; we can only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he was surrounded; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way in which he got the better of their huge strength as well as of his dwelling place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift period must have lived through long ages of the world's history. These implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or semi arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era; but like implements are found associated with the remains of the bones of the lion the tiger and the hippopotamus all of which, and the last especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift implements lasted through the change from a frigid to a torrid climate and probably back again to a cold temperate one. Still the age of the drift implements does not seem to comprise the whole period of man's life before what is called the polished stone age begins.


Hearst Museum # 7-4881
handaxe; brown flint
England; Swanscombe
Collected by the British Museum of Natural History, unknown date 

There is a remarkable series of discoveries made in caves in various parts of Europe which are of a more interesting character than the drift remains and appear to carry us farther down in the history of man. These caves are natural caverns generally formed in the limestone rocks and at present the most remarkable finds have been obtained from the caves of Devonshire, of the Department of the Dordogne in France, from various caves in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf in Germany; but there is scarcely any country in Europe where some caves containing human bones and weapons have not been opened. The rudest drift implements seem older than almost any of those found in caves and on the whole the cave remains seem to give us a picture of man in a more civilized condition. They show us more of his way of life and a greater variety in his implements which are made not of stone only but of wood and bone as well. We have various worked bone implements harpoons with many barbs whereby no doubt man slew the animals which afforded him food and clothing. Some implements of stone and bone which have been found in caves have been called arrow heads; but they are in all probability lance heads, for it seems doubtful whether these primitive men had made the great discovery of the use of the bow and arrow. We may imagine that their lance or harpoon was their great weapon; and a curious and close inquiry has discovered by the marks on some of the animal bones which are found mixed up with the cave implements, that the sinews had been cut from these bones, and used, it may be conjectured as thongs for the bone harpoons. Other implements of a more domestic character have been found - bone awls, doubtless for piercing the animals' skins that they might be sewn together with sinew thread, and bone knives and needles.


Hearst Museum # 7-3783
Lump of flint flakes and bone fragments in breccia
France; Dordogne; Cavern of Les Eyzies
Collected by the University of California Paleontology Department, 1963

What is still more interesting than all these, we here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements as well as some stones are engraved or even rudely sculptured generally with the representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful and really give us a picture of the animals which were man's contemporaries upon the earth so that we have the most positive proof that man lived the contemporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La Madeleine in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a mammoth's tusk engraved with an outline of that animal; and as the mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part even of the old stone age this gives an immense antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little did the scratcher of this rough sketch - for it is not equal in skill to which have been found in other caves - dream of the interest his performance would thousands of years after his death! Not greatest painter of subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man's bones been only found juxtaposition with those of the mammoth his contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attributed to chance of the soil, to the accumulation river deposits, or to many other accidental occurrences; or had the mammoth's bone only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since into our hands; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it sometimes almost seen fabulous, animal by one who actual saw him in real life, gives a strange picture the antiquity of our race, and withal a feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn to-day.



Hearst Museum # 7-202
scratched bone
France, Dordogne, La Madeleine
Collected by the Musee de Toulouse, unknown date

Excerpts from:

THE DAWN OF HISTORY: An introduction to pre-historic study.

Edited by C. F. Keary M.A. of the British Museum

Humboldt Publishing Co., 1883