Brian Fagan. Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. xvi + 400 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-2794-2; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7591-0374-0.

Reviewed by Terri Castaneda (Department of Anthropology, California State University, Sacramento)
Published on H-California (October, 2003)

In Uncharted Waters: Fagan Pens a Popular Account of Prehistoric California

In Uncharted Waters: Fagan Pens a Popular Account of Prehistoric California

Before California is a narrative account of aboriginal California prior to the arrival of Spanish explorers. Chronicling more than 13,000 years of human adaptation to the diverse and changing landscape, this book offers an introduction to both the prehistory of California and the history of California archaeology, from the early-twentieth-century excavation of Emeryville and Cosumnes River Valley shell mounds to the twenty-first-century dominance of the field by Cultural Resource Management (CRM). Written at the introductory level, it is the first comprehensive guide to California archaeology and prehistory designed for a general audience.

The story of prehistoric California is not an easy one to tell. Given the enormous breadth of cultural and linguistic diversity present in California at the time of European contact, and the huge body of highly specialized research addressing our still fragmentary understanding of these cultures, it is no wonder that few writers have undertaken such a monumental book project as this. But author Brian Fagan brings considerable experience to this effort. Trained at Cambridge in Old World and African archaeology, for more than a quarter century he has been doing the difficult and under-appreciated work of translating often turgid and inaccessible scholarship into highly readable books that recruit undergraduate majors to the discipline in droves and bolster public support for archaeological research and preservation. He has also been at this business long enough to know that while praise for popular archaeological writing is rare, criticism is absolutely inescapable--whether it arises out of professional jealousy or a legitimate concern with the sort of surface skimming and scholarly distillation that broad, synthetic works require. A significant portion of this book's preface and opening chapter address the commentary Fagan expects to receive from scholars of California archaeology and prehistory. He wants his readership to know that the Executive Board of the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) invited him to write this text; their endorsement is prominently displayed on the back cover of the book jacket. Although he is not a California archaeologist, Fagan clearly nurtures an abiding interest in the aboriginal peoples who settled the area of California he calls home. For three decades, he has been navigating the coastal waters that fringe the western edge of UC Santa Barbara, where he is professor emeritus of anthropology. This nautical pastime and fascination with maritime culture permeates Before California from beginning to end, such that it often reads more like a literary tribute to the ancient seafaring people in whose wake he now sails than a comprehensive prehistory of the vast area that was to become California.

Fagan unfolds his story in the style of an epic drama that begins in the centuries prior to 11,000 B.C., as humans are making their first appearance on the continent, and closes ominously in 1542, with the fateful anchoring of Spanish ships along the California coastline. Organized in four parts, the text follows a basic chronological format, with regional adaptations and common cultural themes built out from this temporal scaffolding. Part 1 is entitled "The Archaeologist's Tale." Its sole chapter, "A Stream of Time," sketches this long and complicated trajectory, offering readers a helpful outline of what is to follow in much greater detail. This first chapter also serves another important purpose; here, Fagan introduces basic archaeological principles and techniques, reviews earlier comprehensive works on California prehistory, and presents important ethnohistorical data, including maps of contemporary tribal territories, linguistic divisions, and demographic distributions at the time of European contact.[1] This critical ethnographic data underpins virtually all of the scholarship on Native California, although Fagan makes only passing reference to it in the pages that follow, either because it falls outside the scope of his narrative or because he deems it too confusing for a lay readership. Nonetheless, more serious students of Native California will find themselves needing to refer back to this material in order to follow the logic behind various analyses and interpretations discussed in later chapters. Part 1 also identifies "three underlying currents" that run throughout the entire text, tying together the broad chronological periods and diverse adaptations expressed in ancient California society: a cultural continuity grounded in constant mobility, a web of social and economic exchange or "interconnectedness," and a complex system of spiritual beliefs in which supernatural beings and practices occupied a center stage that archaeological science can never fully reconstruct. With these preliminary matters behind him, Fagan turns to "Beginnings."

The four chapters in part 2 bring the story of primordial California forward to approximately 2500 B.C. Conservative interpretations of the archaeological record indicate that humans began entering the continent at least 15,000 years ago, as part of a long migratory process lasting thousands of years.[2] This was facilitated by a now submerged expanse of territory called Beringia, which formed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska during the Late Ice Age, when sea levels were lower. Although we have come to recognize the widespread presence of Paleo-Indians across the North American landscape based upon a diagnostic set of artifacts--fluted stone projectile points--Fagan is careful to dispel popular stereotypes of these people as primitive "big game hunters." While Pleistocene mega-fauna clearly formed a part of their diet, these hunter-gatherer populations were expert at exploiting seasonal plant and smaller animal resources in a wide variety of environmental contexts, including those of prehistoric California. By at least 11,000 B.C., this part of the continent had been peopled, as part of a slow migration by multiple bands, over many generations, moving out of Beringia and Alaska, onto the Great Plains, and then westward across the Great Basin and into California. The archaeological record currently offers scant evidence in support of alternative hypotheses that point to possible movement by land and sea, along the shores of Beringia, the Northwest Coast, and eventually down to California. Sites that might yield evidence of such a migratory path are long submerged under the Pacific Ocean, which during the Late Ice Age extended as much as sixteen miles west of its current location. Shifting coastlines and rising sea levels takes center stage in the three remaining chapters of this section, as Fagan tacks back and forth between coastal, mainland, and offshore settlements, describing the earliest Californians as we know them from archaeological sites that date from 11,000 to 6500 B.C. In a pattern that continues throughout the book, each of these chapters features an ethnographic vignette that brings fully to life the everyday world of prehistoric Californians engaged in a host of subsistence activities: hunting seals and gathering mollusks near Bodega Bay; using baskets and milling stones to gather and process grass and other plant seeds in the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills; or hunting seals, sea lions, and dolphins at Eel Point. Fagan anchors his discussion of these early peoples and adaptations to a limited set of archaeological sites that, by virtue of long-term occupation and excellent stratigraphy, help to define and demonstrate continuity and change in both the social and physical environment. While his intensive focus upon locales like Elkhorn Slough, Skyrocket, and the Channel Islands automatically deselects equally representative sites from the reader's line of vision, perhaps leaving the false impression that California is lacking in a much richer corpus of archaeological settings and scholarship, this strategy is necessary for a general readership. By returning again and again to the same scientists and field sites, Fagan not only provides his readers with a better understanding of the archaeological process itself, he gives them a more coherent and manageable portrait of the ecological changes, technological innovations, and social processes that characterized much larger regional patterns.

Part 3 highlights "The Web of Interconnectedness" that had begun to manifest itself in aboriginal California between 2500 and 1500 B.C. These chapters address some of the most enduring and intriguing themes in California archaeology and prehistory, from acorns and obsidian to shamanism and rock art. Chapter 6, "A Changing World," provides a cultural overview of this era, with its expanding population and increased reliance upon acorns as a dietary mainstay. A lengthy introduction to the harvesting, processing, and nutritional attributes of acorns adds significantly to earlier discussions of the vital role that mobility and the exploitation of seasonally available resources played in the subsistence strategies of these societies. Other diagnostic features of this period include a gendered division of labor, the emergence of increasingly complex forms of social and political organization (tribelets and chieftanship), and the long-distance exchange of prestige items that signal the development of politico-economic alliances and a gradual transition away from egalitarian, to ranked, society. "The Seductive Stone" (chapter 7) focuses on obsidian as a trade good and unparalleled material for the manufacture of razor-sharp blades. Fagan also provides a very readable explanation of obsidian sourcing and hydration techniques that can identify the stone's original quarry site and the approximate timeframe during which it was worked. Chapters 8 and 9 turn our attention to the realms of the supernatural and the mysteries of rock art, respectively. The first of these chapters speaks to a fundamental example of cultural continuity in Native California--a rich tradition of animistic beliefs, coupled with reliance upon the powerful figure of the shaman to mediate between the human and spirit worlds. The fragmentary nature of the archaeological record becomes more apparent in these discussions of cosmology and expressive culture, where related behaviors and beliefs are far more difficult to confidently reconstruct, and where ethnohistorical data, ethnographic analogy, and culture theory play more straightforward and pivotal roles in the interpretive process. This is particularly evident in chapter 9, "Art on the Rocks." The study of prehistoric art in California, as well as the rest of the world, is animated by conflicting and often controversial theories and interpretations. Both this chapter and the one preceding it strengthen Before California, not only because their subject matter makes for important and fascinating reading, but also because Fagan is forthright in his approach, introducing the various arguments, while simultaneously allowing his readers to know that his own analytical biases and interpretations inform his presentation of the material.

Part 4, "A Crowded World," describes the period of 1500 B.C. to A.D. 1542. Five of the six chapters in this section detail distinctive regional traditions still flourishing at the time of European contact. These diverse traditions are grouped by chapter into broad geographic categories: "The Northwest: Dugouts and Salmon," "San Francisco Bay: A Landscape of Mounds," "Central Valley and Foothills: Realm of the Rivers," "The South and Southeast: Coast, Hinterland, and Desert," and "Santa Barbara Channel: The World of the Tomol."[3] Fagan's literary style is at its best here, as he interweaves a century of California archaeology with ethnographic descriptions that make palpable these ancient voices, landscapes, and life ways. The following passage sets the stage for chapter 11: "A.D. 500. The falling afternoon tide leaves bubbling mud in its train. A few reeds poke through the brown mire. Narrow fingers of gravelly sand and boulders extend into the marsh. Densely packed clam beds gleam in the sun. Three women and their children move slowly in a line across the exposed beds, deftly prying fresh clams from their resting places, throwing them into large baskets at their feet" (p. 244).

These opening scenes help readers to crystallize a human image of the societies whose cultures are described in a more inanimate, archaeological context throughout the remainder of each chapter. Using cultural ecology as an explanatory framework, Fagan shows how societies living within the same basic environment typically shared a primary reliance upon a shared natural resource (or set of resources) common to that region--such as acorns, salmon, or cactus--yet developed their own distinctive technologies, social institutions, languages, and customs. The same archaeologists and sites introduced in earlier time periods and chapters are revisited in this section, showing continuities and transformations from the Paleo-Indian through the Late Prehistoric Periods, while also highlighting the array of interdisciplinary scientific techniques used in contemporary archaeology. Throughout the entire book, Fagan employs the more familiar and unassuming first-person voice when explaining highly technical material, like the analysis of deep-sea cores to reconstruct the shifting California coastline or the examination of skeletal pathologies as indices of dietary health or human violence. Occasionally referring to his own web searches or difficulty in making sense of specialized literature, he brings his readers along as equals, on what is clearly his own voyage of discovery.

Part 4 includes the book's final chapter, "Entrada," which sets the stage for European exploration and conquest. It also brings the story of prehistoric California to a close, with just a glimpse at the enormous devastation indigenous peoples and cultures would suffer from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries.[4]

Before California is a welcome addition to the popular literature on California history and culture. It fills an obvious gap on the shelves of public libraries, bookstores, secondary schools, and museum gift shops. With supplementary readings drawn from more scholarly sources, it is also suitable as a core text for college and university courses in California Studies, Native American Studies, and Archaeology. However, instructors who adopt the book for such use will have to run a certain amount of interference to correct imbalances and errors.

The book strongly favors Southern California, both its inland and coastal cultures, but particularly the latter. The Chumash and their ancestors receive the lion's share of attention--a fact that is hardly surprising, given that this is Fagan's home turf. Still, two areas of the state seem especially neglected by comparison and yet both boast a long history of significant archaeological investigation. One of these under-discussed areas includes those portions of the Great Basin that lie within the geopolitical boundary of California. Fagan rarely touches upon this tradition, except in his discussion of rock art. Perhaps he was bowing to the anthropological convention that separates the California and Great Basin "culture areas," but general readers will be completely unaware that much of the territory on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada falls within another corpus of scholarly research and literature. And while his treatment of Northern California is weaker overall by comparison to the southern reaches of the state, Northeastern and North Central California are given particularly slim coverage. These problems seem slight by comparison to other errors that plague this first edition. The most unfortunate of these involves Cora Du Bois, ethnographer of the Wintu and the Ghost Dance of 1870. Her name appears in the text, notes, and index as "Charles" Du Bois. Cora Du Bois conducted ethnographic research in the early 1930s under Kroeber's supervision at Berkeley, before moving on to Harvard, where she became the first woman anthropologist in her department to be tenured. Another important contributor to California anthropology is Carobeth Laird, whose name appears on page 330 as "Caroline Beard" and whose book about her marriage to J. P. Harrington, Encounter with an Angry God, receives no citation whatsoever in the entire text.[5] The discussion of Central California archaeology and Sacramento City College needs to note that Robert Heizer not only visited and excavated sites in the Cosumnes River Valley while he was at Berkeley, but that "the start of his illustrious career" (p. 273) in California archaeology was at Sacramento City College where he completed much of his undergraduate anthropology work; he already knew intimately both Lillard and the shell mounds along the Sacramento Valley's riparian corridors, when "news of the Windmiller discoveries reached [him at] Berkeley" (p. 273).[6] Numerous typographical and related errors are also found throughout the book, such as "Shasha" (p. 277) rather than Shasta; "Columnes" (p. 281) rather than Cosumnes; "Carrillo" (p. 292) instead of Cabrillo; and a textual reference to box 9.1 (p. 202) that should refer, it seems, to box 9.2, "Sally's Rock and a Shaman's Quest" (p. 205). Perhaps some of these problems can be corrected before publication of the paperback version. Such an effort would greatly enhance the value of Before California for both the general reading public and the many students of California archaeology who will be drawn, by this introductory text, into the scholarly ranks of the next generation.

Notes

[1]. Scholarly syntheses and edited volumes on Native California prehistory and/or society include Michael J. Moratto, California Archaeology (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984); Joseph L. Chartkoff and Kerry Kona Chartkoff, The Archaeology of California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); Robert F. Heizer, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978); and Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1925).

[2]. The author notes that he is writing from a western scientific perspective that privileges a linear construction of history and often conflicts with the origin stories of Native California.

[3]. "Tomol" is the Chumash word for planked canoe.

[4]. On p. 359, Fagan refers to the brass plate found at Drake's Bay in 1934 and its "questionable authenticity." While this book was in press, an article by E. Von der Porten, R. Aker, R. W. Allen, and J. M. Spitze, "Who Made Drake's Plate of Brass?" appeared in California History 81(2): pp. 116-133. It describes the elaborate hoax that fooled historians and scientists for over forty years; scholarly references to this plate can now be laid fully to rest.

[5]. Carobeth Laird, Encounter with an Angry God (Banning: Malki Museum Press, 1975).

[6]. Arlean H. Towne, A History of Central California Archaeology, 1880-1940 (Salinas: Coyote Press, 1984).

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Citation: Terri Castaneda. Review of Fagan, Brian, Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants. H-California, H-Net Reviews. October, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8328

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