Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

This paper summarizes some ideas that have occurred to me about North Coast Range archaeology while thinking about data derived from excavations on Dry Creek, Sonoma County, California. The excavations there were performed at the request of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a part of an archaeological evaluation of the Warm Springs Dam Project. This being so, the ideas generated are immediately applicable only to 60 or so archaeological sites along a short stretch of Dry Creek and its tributaries. Some of my conclusions, however, have inherently greater generality and all of them have some relevance to Pomo archaeology as a whole. That is not to say the conclusions are correct; archaeological conclusions are almost never correct in the long run, at least not as they are specifically formulated, but insofar as they are concretely stated they can always be used as hypotheses leading to further development. The details of site description and specimen provenience are contained in the report of Baumhoff and Orlins (1979).