This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/Chumash Sound.jpg 2013-07-14T13:58:12-07:00 Regime III -- Maritime-Terrestrial Arcadia: The Chumash Era, 8,500 to 2,500 Years Ago 150 image_header 2019-09-20T16:19:03-07:00

  "And above all, they build launches, very elaborate ones, in which they go to sea."
            --Padre Pedro Font, 24 February 1776, near Syuxtun (Santa Barbara)

  
  The splendors of the Chumash civilization begin with its great antiquity,  Originally a seafaring people who--according to the archeological record-- began permanent occupation of the Channel Islands, 8,500 years ago.  According to living Chumash, they were created from magic seeds on Limuw, (Santa Cruz Island).  Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie tells the story.
  
  The Chumash were an island people, who, if they were not created on Limuw, must surely have arrived there already masters of the sea.  And then, consonant with the Chumash story of the "Rainbow Bridge," the Chumash overflowed from the Channel Islands and began to colonize the mainland of the Southern California Bight about 7,000 years ago.  Over the next seventy centuries, they developed a sophisticated maritime-terrestrial economy, which supported the largest and most densely-populated region of indigenous California south of the rain forests of the Northwest Pacific Coast.  This civilization, centered on the Santa Barbara Channel, thrived on both the produce of the Pacific Ocean and on the abundance of mainland plant and animal resources.Note
  
  Chumashan maritime culture was truly ancient.  The remotest island, San Clemente, fully 77 km from the mainland coast, preserves a continuous record of seafaring societies since 8,000-8,500 years ago.  They were originally sea hunters "enjoyed a highly productive marine economy, based to a large extent on hunting seals, sea lions, and dolphins and collecting shellfish."Note  Migrating a thousand years later to the terrestrial mainland, the Chumashans eventually stopped hunting the big sea mammals and shifted to fishing with nets, weirs, hooks, and weirs, and to harvesting tidal waters of abalone and other marine shellfish. On land, they diversified their resource base to include hunting, plant harvesting, and long-distance trade, and by doing so minimizing their risks due to seasonal draughts.
  
  The Chumash language is one of the founding languages: possibly the oldest in California.  Long believed to be part of the Hokan stock, it is now classified as an "isolate": the language of the first human settlers who arrived by sea.  "Because of its linguistic distinctiveness and lack of established relationships to other families of the Americas, the Chumashan family may well constitute one of the 'basement' language families of California."Note
  
  A culture and economic region that could be called "Chumashia" radiated outward from Limuw (Santa Cruz Island), in a remarkable trade network that can be tracked by its money economy, which began about 5,000 years ago.   Money currency took the form of seashells (particularly olivella), manufactured with small precision tools on the Channel Islands, as a sort of mint.  Olivella have been found inland for thousands of miles to the northeast, east and the southeast.  Northward, the Chumashans traded their olivella money coastwise through the San Francisco Bay, and by land along the paths that connected them to the Central Valley, via the ancestors of the Yokuts and other Penutians.  The unique Olivella grooved rectangle beads, have been found far inland, around Lake Tahoe, and present-day Oregon.  
  
  Westward, Chumashan trade routes ran through the Cajon Pass, along a path that Euro-Americans arriving from the East called the Old Spanish Trail (and much later, U.S. Route 66).  The trail connected the Chumashans to the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecans of the Great Basin: Mohave, Shoshone, Commanche, Apache, Hopi, and onward through to its terminus on the Rio Grande near Isleta.    "Over this thousand miles of trail, shell from the coast passed" in trade for myriad goods produced far inland, from baskets to turquoise.Note 
  
  
  SHIFT TO ACORN ECONOMIES
  
  The "Early Holocene" era in Southern California before 5,000 years ago is known by archeologists as the "Millingstone Horizon," an archaeological named period for the characteristic portable metates--flat grinding stones--and the matching manos, or hand stones. The Millingstone people engaged in a broad consumption of diverse grains and animal foods, both aquatic and terrestrial, processing many of them with the flat, all-purpose metates.  
  
  By about 5,000 years ago, the Chumash made a dramatic shift toward intensive resource processing, marked by the replacement of the millingstone (metate and mano) with the mortar and pestle, used primarily for processing acorns. The shift to to acorn-based economies, it is now certain, involved dramatic fundamental social reorganization, which led to inequalities of wealth and power.  It ultimately led to the rise of hereditary aristocracies, the gender division of labor, elaborate money economies,  the hardening of territorial boundaries, legal-ideological systems, chieftaincies and priesthoods, learning, and new technologies.Note
  
  The meaty nut of the oak tree, genus Quercus, is an especially rich food source, but requires elaborate, labor-intensive processing before it can be eaten.  The remarkable fecundity of the oak woodlands that characterized the climax forest of the coasts and lowlands ringing the valleys and prairie plains of California, owes greatly to the acorn yield.  Circa 1760, it is estimated that the California native peoples consumed 60,000 tons of acorns per year, an average of 400 lbs/ 181 kg per person per year, which accounts for at least half of indigenous Californians diets (Fagan 2003: 131).
  
  Although plentiful and nutritious, Millingstone people largely avoided them, because acorns are not edible without labor-intensive processing to remove the bitter (and to infants, potentially toxic) tannic acid.  For thousands of years, they were second-ranked food sources, to be exploited only when seafood, game, seeds and fruits became scarce.  Growing populations made possible by diverse seasonal gathering began depleting the first-ranked foods (large mammals, seeds, shellfish), the Hokan-Chumuash fond the acorn increasingly attractive, especially once the labor system was reconfigured to exploit the labor of women and non-elites. The Hokan-Chumashans made a shift in kind to a "rank society," with a ruling class who controlled the accumulated acorn granaries.
  
  Terrestrially, the Chumashans enjoyed a  “...a kaleidoscope of potential diet.  Late spring and early summer was a special time, when fresh greens abounded and people could feast off miner’s lettuce, the unrolled fronds of bracken ferns, wild pea leaves, and many more wild vegetables.  Next, wild flower burst into vibrant color, then into seed for the all-important grass harvest.  By late summer and during early fall, blue elderberries, manzanita berries, and other fruit reached perfection.  Fall was the time of the nut harvests--hazel, piñons, and, above all, oak acorns.” (p. 131)
  
  This acorn economy arose all across California, but in Chumashan territories it was blended with the preexisting maritime economy, giving the Chumash a particularly rich regional basis for social development.  The Chumash also maximized the diversity of their food sources, so that during periods of terrestrial drought, heavy exploitation of the marine ecology sustained their populations. ( Kennett and Kennett 2004)
  
  The rise of the acorn economies created a feedback loop, in which territories were able to support larger populations.  These larger populations, in turn, needed greater and greater intensification of the increasingly scarce resources available within their kin- or village-group's collecting/hunting/fishing areas. And as the growing populations reached greater densities and became ever more wedded to their local  territories. 
  
   

  Source Bibliography:

  Basgall, M. (1987) “Resource Intensification Among Hunter-Gatherers: Acorn Economies in Prehistoric California. Research in Economic Anthropology 9 pp. 21-52.  Reprinted in Raab and Jones, 2004, pp. 86-98.
  
  Erlandson, J. M. (1994) Early Hunter-gatherers of the California Coast. Plenum Press, New York.
  
  Hinton, Leanne. “Takic and Yuman: A Study in Phonological Convergence,” International Journal of American Linguistics, 57: 2 (Apr., 1991): 133-157.
  
  Johnson, John R. and Joseph G. Lorenz, "Genetics, Linguistics, and Prehistoric Migrations: An Analysis of California Indian Mitochondrial DNA Lineages." Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology.  26:1 (2006). pp. 33-64.
  
  Jones, Terry L. (1996) “Mortars, Pestles, and Division of Labor in Prehistoric California: A View from Big Sur.” American Antiquity, 61:2 (April), pp. 243-264.
  
  Kroeber, Alfred L. (1953)  Handbook of the Indians of California Berkeley: California Book Company.
  
  Moratto, Michael J. (1984)  California Archeology. (with David A. Fredrickson, Christopher Raven, and Claude N. Warren.) Orlando, Fl: Academic Press, Inc. a division of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publisers.
  
  Poser, William J. (1995) “Binary Comparison and the History of Hokan Comparative Studies,” International Journal of American Linguistics. 61:1 (Jan.): 135-144.
  
  Raab, L. Mark, and William J. Howard (2002) "Modeling Cultural Connections Between the Southern Channel Islands and Western United States: The Middle Holocene Distribution of Olivella Grooved Rectangle Beads," in Proceedings of the Fifth California Islands Symposium,
  
  David  R. Browne, Kathryn L. Mitchell, and Henry W. Chaney, eds., pp. 590-597.  Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
  
  Raab, L. Mark, and Jones, Terry L., Eds,  (2004) Prehistoric California: Archaeology and the Myth of Paradise. Salt lake City: University of Utah Press.
  
  Raab, L. Mark (2005) “Political Ecology of Prehistoric Los Angeles,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds, Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press., pp. 23-37.
  
  Sutton, Mark Q. (1993) "On the Subsistence Ecology of the 'Late Inland Millingstone Horizon' in Southern California,"  Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology.  15:1 pp. 134-140.
  
  Wallace, William J. (1955). “A Suggested Chronology for Southern California Coastal Archaeology.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 11:3, pp. 214-30.