Summer Field School: Indigenous Archaeology Field Methods Summary

By Gabriel Sanchez, Curator of Zooarchaeology at MNCH, UO Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Research Associate with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust

Photo by Adrian Moreno, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band

The Indigenous archaeology field methods course offers an alternative to traditional archaeological field schools, which focus on excavations at a single archaeological site, often with little to no collaboration or participation of Indigenous peoples and local Tribes.

The field program was collaboratively designed by Dr. Gabe Sanchez and the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and Land Trust with support from Alec Apodaca, Cultural Resource Program Manager, and Tribal Chairman Valentin Lopez. The goal of the program was to train Tribal members and students in cultural resource management through a Tribal cultural landscape perspective that balances tribal stewardship goals, land conservation, and education. The program engaged with lands throughout the Amah Mutsun Land Trust Stewardship Areas to accomplish these goals, Figure 1. These lands include Año Nuevo State Park, Chitactac County Park, Elkhorn Slough Reserve, Mission San Juan Bautista, Mt. Madonna County Park, Rocks Ranch Wildlife Crossing, and lands held by private landowners. The program partnered with various agencies, including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Santa Clara County Parks. Guest lecturers included Chairman Valentin Lopez, Dr. Tsim Schneider, UC-Santa Cruz, Dr. Lee Panich, Santa Clara University, Dr. Martin Rizzo-Martinez, UC-Santa Cruz, and Dr. Kent Lightfoot, UC-Berkeley. Field visits to these sites were also led by Tribe members.

Figure 1. Overview of the central California coast with ethnographic boundaries. The map includes the locations of Spanish Missions and Indigenous village sites. The map includes the boundary of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust stewardship area. The image is used with the permission of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.

Participant Summary: In total there were 42 participants in the ANTM Field School, see below.

University of Oregon participants included 13 students from the University of Oregon, UC-Berkeley, San Francisco State, and Santa Clara University. There were three supervisors including Gabe Sanchez, Tori Eisenhart, and Mira McQuown.

AMLT On the Tribal end there were two cooks (one Tribal member and one spouse of a Tribe member) hired by the Tribe for the field program, Alec Apodaca as the co-PI, and 23 Tribal members who participated in the program ranging from 16 years of age to 55 years of age. This included three Tribal field supervisors that included Marcella Luna, Gabriel Pineida, and Alexii Sigona.

Weekly Program overview

Week 1: During week one, we accomplished a variety of goals, including orienting students and Tribal members to the project’s goals and methods.

Guest lecture: Given by Chairman Lopez. Provided an overview of the project, cultural history, colonialism, and the Tribal creation story.

July 8: Orientation day. We began the morning with a lecture outlining the summer program goals and an overview of the project history. After the lecture students and Tribal members worked their way through four teaching areas to learn:

1. Vertebrate osteology (zooarchaeology) and what previous findings have taught us about human-animal relationships. Taught by Dr. Gabe Sanchez
2. Invertebrate zooarchaeology. Taught by Dr. Mike Grone, Senior State Park Archaeologist, California State Parks.
3. Taught by Alec Apodaca, AMLT and UC-Berkeley, and Alexii Sigona, AMTB, AMLT, and Ph.D Candidate, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC-Berkeley.
4. Lithic workshop and flintknapping. Taught Tori Eisenhart, UO and Mira McQuown, UC-Berkeley.

July 9: Elkhorn Slough Reserve. Students were given a presentation by Dr. Kerstin Wasson, Research Coordinator, regarding the research conducted at the slough and a background on the slough and its ecology. Students and Tribal members initiated fieldwork at the slough that day.

July 10: Early in the morning, due to a low tide, students learned how to conduct an oyster aquaculture survey to assess the growth and recruitment of native oysters led by Dr. Kerstin Wasson and Jacob Harris (AMLT Ocean Program Staff), Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Following the oyster workshop, students and Tribal members documented archaeological sites in the slough by applying low-impact survey methods developed by the Tribe known as Integrative Cultural Resource Surveys.

July 11: Our field school was invited by the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County to conduct ground penetrating radar survey at an ancestral village site to help guide the placement of excavation units. Gabe ran the GPR with the support of UO students, Tribal members, and Cabrillo Community College students. Alec led ethnobotanical mapping with a small group comprised of Amah Mutsun, Esselen, and students to help contextualize the site within the broader cultural landscape. Students and Tribe members from all teams collectively worked on screening spoil piles created from a recent culvert rehabilitation, which contained archaeological materials, such as faunal remains, and a variety of lithic stone tool debris.

The fieldwork represented an intertribal research collaboration between the AMLT and the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County. Our field school was invited to a dinner hosted by the Esselen, which culminated in sharing of food, Tribal stories, and songs. We provided the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County their findings before the start of their excavations on July 15.

July 12: We visited Chitactac County Park and worked with Santa Clara County Parks archaeologist Ben Curry to orient students and the Tribe to the park. AMLT Tribal members led the group through a tour of the park, its history, and the contemporary use of the ancestral village site by the Tribe. Our goal was to provide generate discussion of heritage management, which was centered on Tribal views of the park, and how future stewardship of bedrock milling features, petroglyphs, and sites may occur.

Weeks 2-3: During weeks 2-3, we conducted a significant amount of Integrative Cultural Resource Surveys throughout the AMLT Stewardship area. We worked at five sites applying these methodologies including sites spanning the pre- and post-contact era.

Guest lectures:

Week 2: Dr. Tsim Schneider. Provided an overview of his work on colonialism, decolonizing archaeology, and places of refuge. He offered advice for Tribal members about entering academia and information to non-Tribal scholars on working meaningfully with Tribes.

Week 3: Dr. Martin Rizzo-Martinez. Provided a history of colonialism in the region with a special emphasis on the Spanish Mission Period and Mexican Period. As an expert on the Mission Period, Dr. Rizzo-Martinez provided students with a cultural overview of colonialism and colonial brutality at Mission Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista. He shared mission baptismal records for Mission San Juan Bautista (a few days before students and the Tribe visited) and placed our work at Chitactac, Mission San Juan Bautista, and Pattie Farms in a cultural context.

July 15-18: Rocks Ranch Integrative Cultural Resource Survey: At Rocks Ranch, we encountered three archaeological sites but conducted a survey across a sample of the > 2,600-acre property. Only one site had been previously recorded, while the other two sites encountered were unrecorded archaeological sites. Sites included a significant number of bedrock mortars, cupules, and a diversity of lithic, shellfish, and vertebrate fauna.

July 18-24: Pattie Farm represents a private property within the Chitactac cultural landscape. During our time there, we conducted integrative cultural resource surveys, ground penetrating radar survey, opportunistic X-Ray Fluorescence scanning, and bucket augering. The site included a diversity of stone tools, stone sources, and cultural materials. While at Pattie Farms, Dr. Lee Panich conducted X-ray fluorescence on more than 40 obsidian tools and flakes from the property and sourced these materials to obsidian sources throughout California. Most notably, the XRF survey revealed dark olive-green bottle glass kickups, which date to the mission and Mexican period, which have appeared to have been flaked and in the fashion of a core. While intensive surveys were taking place at Pattie Farm, smaller squads surveyed lands adjacent to the Farm that is managed by Santa Clara County Parks at Mount Madonna. Our surveys along the lowlands of the Mount Madonna revealed an additional three archaeological sites there were unrecorded, which consisted of fire cracked rock, chert flakes, and midden-colored soil. Only preliminary studies were conducted here, and the decision as made to follow up in future seasons, perhaps next years’ field school, to better understand those sites.

July 25: Mission San Juan Bautista: At the tribe’s request, we conducted fieldwork and gave students and Tribal members a guided tour of Mission San Juan Bautista led by Parks docents. The AMTB are descendants of Mission San Juan Bautista and Mission Santa Cruz survivors.

FYI: This was a very traumatic experience for students and Tribal members. We encountered a significant number of ancestral remains representing ancestors who died as a result of Spanish colonialism and a systemic genocide of Indigenous peoples, including the Mutsun people.

In terms of fieldwork, we conducted surface surveys and ground penetrating radar on a portion of the Mission that housed Indigenous families currently managed by California State Parks. During surface surveys, our teams also assisted a graduate student who had curated heavy fraction water flotation samples in the sorting of those samples. Students and interns gained experience in sorting heavy fractions, GPR, and surface surveying. In addition, our team gained insight about the disconnect that may occur between State-generated public interpretations of the Mission system and those held by local Tribes who survived those missions.

July 26: Año Nuevo and Quiroste: On this day, students toured the location of our excavations for week 4. They also received a guided tour of the Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve by Esak Ordoñez, a member of the AMTB, AMLT, and the Native Stewardship Corps. In addition to the guided tour, the students also had an opportunity to participate in monitoring heavy equipment (backhoe) excavations on the site and observe how monitors work closely with operators to carefully expose overburden on sensitive sites that are too deep and compacted to excavate by hand.

Week 4: Excavations at Año Nuevo State Park at a previously unrecorded site

Guest lecture: By Dr. Kent Lightfoot. Provided an overview of collaborative archaeology. An overview of archaeological findings from past fieldwork and how these data inform Tribal conservation, restoration, and relearning efforts.

July 29 to August 2: We established a 7 m x 3 m grid (resulting in 21 1 m x 1 m excavation units) at a previously unrecorded site threatened by to climate change. The site is being bisected a pedestrian pathway along the bluff for beach access and a nearby creek that is actively destroying the site. We excavated four 1 x 1 m units in their entirety, collecting 20-liter bulk soil samples from every level. Students and Tribal members worked together during all phases of the excavations, focusing on excavation methods, plan and side-wall profile sketching, soil screening, and collecting soil samples for water flotation analysis

The photos below were taken by Adrian Moreno and Sal Estrada, members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.