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The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse explores the dual practices of refuge and recourse among Indigenous peoples of California. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Indigenous Coast Miwok communities in California persisted throughout multiple waves of colonial intrusion. But to what ends? Applying theories of place and landscape, social memory, and mobility to the analysis of six archaeological sites, Tsim D. Schneider argues for a new direction in the archaeology of colonialism. This book offers insight about the critical and ongoing relationships Indigenous people maintained to their homelands despite colonization and systematic destruction of their cultural sites. Schneider is a citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the sovereign and federally recognized tribe of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people whose ancestral homelands and homewaters are the central focus of The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse. Viewing this colonial narrative from an Indigenous perspective, Schneider focuses on the nearly one quarter of Coast Miwok people who survived the missions and created outlets within and beyond colonial settlements to resist and endure colonialism. Fleeing these colonial missions and other establishments and taking refuge around the San Francisco Bay Area, Coast Miwok people sought to protect their identities by remaining connected to culturally and historically significant places. Mobility and a sense of place further enabled Coast Miwok people to find recourse and make decisions about their future through selective participation in colonial projects. In this book, Tsim D. Schneider argues that these distancing and familiarizing efforts contribute to the resilience of Coast Miwok communities and a sense of relevance and belonging to stolen lands and waters. Facing death, violence, and the pervading uncertainty of change, Indigenous people of the Marin Peninsula balanced the pull and persistence of place against the unknown possibilities of a dynamic colonial landscape and the forward-thinking required to survive. History, change, and the future can be read in the story of Coast Miwok people.

Spanish missions in North America were once viewed as confining and stagnant communities, with native peoples on the margins of the colonial enterprise. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research challenges that notion. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missionsconsiders how native peoples actively incorporated the mission system into their own dynamic existence. The book, written by diverse scholars and edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, covers missions in the Spanish borderlands from California to Texas to Georgia.Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources.Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missionsoffers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions.

Indigenous negotiations of European colonialism in North America are more complex than models of domination and resistance reveal. Indigenous people—acting according to their own historically and culturally specific ways of knowing and being in the world—developed strategies for remaking their identities, material choices, and social configurations to survive one or multiple phases of colonization. Archaeologists are making strides in documenting the contingencies and consequences of these strategies, yet their focus is often skewed toward sites of contact and colonialism (e.g., missions and forts). This article examines places of refuge for native people navigating colonial programs in the San Francisco Bay area of California. I use a resistance-memory-refuge framework to reevaluate resistance to Spanish missions, including the possible reoccupation of landscapes by fugitive orfurloughed Indians. Commemorative trips to shellmounds and other refuges support the concept of an indigenous hinterland, or landscapes that, in time, provided contexts for continuity and adjustment among Indian communities making social, material, and economic choices in the wake ofmissionization. By viewing colonialism from the outside in, this reoriented approach can potentially enhance connections between archaeological and Native American communities.

Over the past 20 years, collaboration has become an essential aspect of archaeological practice in North America. In paying increased attention to the voices of descendant and local communities, archaeologists have become aware of the persistent injustices these often marginalized groups face. Building on growing calls for a responsive and engaged cultural heritage praxis, this forum article brings together a group of Native and non-Native scholars working at the nexus of history, ethnography, archaeology, and law in order to grapple with the role of archaeology in advancing social justice. Contributors to this article touch on a diverse range of critical issues facing Indigenous communities in the United States, including heritage law, decolonization, foodways, community-based participatory research, and pedagogy. Uniting these commentaries is a shared emphasis on research practices that promote Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. In drawing these case studies together, we articulate a sovereignty-based model of social justice that facilitates Indigenous control over cultural heritage in ways that address their contemporary needs and goals.

To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail created by archaeologists reveals an enduring emphasis on precontact materials to the exclusion of more recent patterns of Indigenous occupation and land use. In assessing sites occupied by Indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of Native presence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about Indigenous culture change. Our findings further reveal the shortcomings of traditional site recording systems, in which archaeologists typically categorize sites within the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad on the basis of commonsense decisions that conflate chronology with identity. Instead, we argue for recording practices that focus specifically on the calendric ages of occupation for any given site. Para entender las implicaciones de las prácticas de registro e inventariación de sitios arqueológicos asociados con la persistencia indígena después de la llegada de los europeos, examinamos el registro documental asociado con casi 900 sitios arqueológicos en el condado de Marin, California. Comenzando con las primeras encuestas regionales realizadas a principios del siglo veinte y continuando hasta el presente, el registro creado por los arqueólogos revela un énfasis constante en los materiales precontacto y la exclusión de patrones de uso y residencia más recientes. Al evaluar los sitios ocupados por grupos indígenas desde finales del siglo dieciséis hasta mediados del siglo veinte, analizamos la manera en que el uso de múltiples líneas de evidencia (incluidos los artefactos diagnósticos, técnicas de datación cronométrica, y documentación histórica) puede contribuir a iluminar patrones sutiles pero generalizados de presencia que han sido ocultados por premisas esencialistas sobre el cambio cultural indígena. Nuestros hallazgos resaltan las deficiencias de los sistemas tradicionales de registro en los que los arqueólogos clasifican los sitios como prehistóricos, protohistóricos o históricos con base en decisiones de sentido común que mezclan la cronología con la identidad. En su lugar, abogamos por prácticas de registro centradas específicamente en las fechas calendáricas de ocupación de los sitios.

Conventional accounts of missionary and settler colonialism in California have overemphasized the loss experienced by Native Americans. For indigenous Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people of the San Francisco Bay Area, a story of loss contrasts sharply with their casino–a symbol of prosperity–established in 2013. Each narrative is anchored to highly visible places that commemorate either loss or success. These places, examined here using two case studies, also conceal an important “heritage in-between”–that is, the critical time period, spaces, and things that reflect native resilience and transformation–that might serve to better contextualize both narrative projects.

The periodization used to distinguish sites and artifacts as \"prehistoric\" or \"historic\" translates to the selection of field methods and analytical techniques. This comes at the expense of developing new approaches to track continuities and adjustments in Native American site use, technologies, and other cultural traditions, such as mobility across an artificial divide between prehistory and history. To evaluate the mobility of Coast Miwok people in colonial San Francisco Bay, California, this article presents an experimental technique that compares radiocarbon and geochemical data from a Late period Phase 2(A.D. 1500-1800) shellmound (CA-MRN-114) to baptismal records from Spanish missions (A.D.l 776-1830s). Supported by eyewitness accounts of native fugitivism, furlough, and foraging at the missions, Coast Miwok baptisms before 1817 are at their lowest during traditional times of mussel harvests. After 1817, a different pattern is examined vis-d-vis the colonial landscapes taking shape in the region. Radiocarbon, geochemical, and documentary evidence supports the conclusion that seasonally oriented Coast Miwok mobility involving the collection of shellfish continued even during missionization. With further refinement, the proposed methodological framework holds promise for documenting patterns that often go unseen in the historical record and enhancing the archaeology of colonialism in North America.

This report focuses on the morphometric and elemental analysis of glass beads collected from an adobe structure (CA-SCR-217H-T) at Mission Santa Cruz, which operated between 1791 and the 1830s in the colonial province of Alta (upper) California. Previous chemical research established a chronological framework for opacified beads collected from sites in Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the southeastern United States. Testing the viability of this chronological framework for California, we analyzed 100 white glass beads using a conventional typology and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS)—the first application of LA-ICP-MS to a California mission. We present the results of the LA-ICP-MS study and then briefly comment on the potential for LA-ICP-MS to refine chronologies associated with colonial missions and other postcontact sites.

California’s Franciscan missions were grounded in Indigenous homelands that to this day remain largely undertheorized and trivialized by scholarly and popular understandings of missions as inescapable fortresses of confinement. Narratives that position California’s missions as places of Indigenous imprisonment endure but they are at odds with a growing body of archaeological and documentary evidence demonstrating the persistence of Native lives, activities, and decision-making taking place within and beyond the walls of missions. We argue that interpretations of the missions in scholarly and popular conversation must make Indigenous persistence and resilient relationships to meaningful landscapes the cardinal priorities, not secondary attributes, in the study of Indigenous responses to colonization.

This paper examines the marine reservoir effect for Tomales Bay, a 25.5-km-long tidal estuary along the northern coast of California. We determined the regional ∆R through radiocarbon (14C) measurements of pre-1950 shells from a museum collection as well as archaeologically recovered shell samples from a historical railroad grade of known construction date. These results are compared against four sets of paired shell and bone samples from two local archaeological sites. Our results indicate little spatial variation along the inner bay, but the proposed ∆R value is lower than those previously reported for nearby areas along the Pacific Coast. We also note potential variability in regional ∆R of approximately 200 14C years for the late Holocene, and comparison with an older paired bone and shell sample points toward more significant temporal variation earlier in time.