Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

This paper sketches the principal music and culture areas of native California and identifies general characteristics that distinguish the region in the overall sphere of Native American music. Rather than provide notations or detailed analyses I describe the music according to a set of general parameters that I have found useful in previous comparative research. The following elements are considered: (1) vocal quality or timbre; (2) presence of words or vocables, text-setting, and repetition of text; (3) musical organization or texture; (4) musical form or structure, including phrase-length; (5) melodic range or ambitus; (6) melodic contour or direction; (7) scale, particularly number of tones in scale; (8) rhythm, especially meter; and (9) other notable tendencies. For readers who want more detailed information, sources describing the music or the performance contexts of public singing are noted throughout.

Recognition of this earlier occupational component has significant implications for regional settlement histories and cultural chronology. Subsequent treatments of central coast culture history (Jones and Hylkema 1988; Jones et al. 1989) have relied heavily upon data from this location to define the Middle Period. Recent discussion of early Holocene settlement along the central California coast has been forced, following the original conclusions on the dating of CA-MNT-229, to interpret an apparent absence of early coastal sites in the Monterey Bay area (Breschini and Haversat 1991a: 125 - 132). Breschini and Haversat suggested that this absence may be attributed either to sea-level rise (1991a: 127) or to the ruggedness of the Monterey Bay shoreline relative to more habitable inland terrain (1991a: 131). The early component now recognized at CA-MNT-229 supports recent findings from CA-SON-348/H (Schwaderer et al. 1990; Schwaderer 1992) and other sites, where the antiquity of human presence in the coastal zone of central California has been found to be substantially older than suggested by the corpus of previously available data. Since the original interpretation of the chronology of CA-MNT-229 has been questioned elsewhere (Jones and Hildebrandt 1990:73; Bouey and Basgall 1991:52), this paper is simply intended to set the record straight and present a revised assessment of the dating of this important site. The following discussion emphasizes those aspects of the excavation that bear on the dating of the site—radiocarbon, obsidian hydration, shell and glass beads, and flaked and ground stone artifacts. Descriptions of the rest of the material inventory recovered from this location are included in the original site reports (Dondero 1984; Dietz et al. 1986, 1988).

The fortuitous discovery of a middle Archaic burial at an open site on the shore of Utah Lake in the eastern Great Basin, therefore, is important as it provides scarce information about: 1) burial patterns; 2) the health and stature of indigenous populations; 3) ideology; and 4) the relationship between dogs and people during the mid-Archaic Period.

Mission records, however, contain rich demographic and social data essential for understanding the dynamics of culture contact at the regional level (Aschmann 1986:243-244). Analysis of regional dynamics is essential because—to cite one reason—mission documents cannot be used to estimate native population without assessing the extent of conversion. Simply, if large numbers of native peoples remained outside the mission system, then the mission records incompletely reflect the total population. Since the proportion of neophytes to unconverted natives was not a constant, demographic reconstruction based on mission records require analysis of the conversion process. In the balance of this article we analyze data on conversion and demography from the baptismal registers of Mission Nuestra Santisima Senora de El Rosario de Vinadaco, Baja California (Fig. 1).

The study results presented in this paper are concerned only with external shell growth. In particular, this research centers on highly defined ridges and grooves on the external shell surface. These pronounced external features, or external periodic landmarks, are presumed to represent fortnightly and annual periodicities in shell growth. The presumed fortnightly ridges of Chione clams are evident as raised concentric sculptures on the shell surface, and are each supposed to represent a two-week period of shell growth. The presumed annual bands or grooves, which more often appear as checks in the shell surface, are visible on most molluscan skeletons, and are believed to record the winter cessation of growth. Biologists counting these checks achieve the chronological age of the organism. From the archaeological perspective, it has been proposed that the season of death can be inferred from the number of fortnightly ridges per year, and from the position of the last annual band in relation to preceding annuli or to the shell margin itself (Fig. 1). This paper reports the final results of a test for three seasonality methods (Cerreto 1988).

During the recent reanalysis of the flaked stone artifacts from the 1951-1961 excavations of the Rose Spring site (CA-INY-372; Fig. 1), an unusual bifacially worked artifact was noted in the collection. This specimen (1-186965), collected from the surface of the site by Francis Riddell in June of 1956, had been catalogued as a broken biface. However, upon closer scrutiny, the specimen proved to be a pressure-flaked, late-stage proximal fragment of an obsidian point with large channel flakes removed from each side of the artifact.

No other issue in Orange County archaeology has been as intense and sustained as that surrounding the question of prehistoric jasper procurement/ trade/control. The once-conventional wisdom that jasper recovered from Orange County sites was obtained in trade from desert regions to the east (McKinney 1967:27) went uncontested (e.g.. Hudson 1969:27) until Cottrell published her view that Orange County entrepreneurs procured the resource directly from the deserts (Cottrell and Del Chario 1984: 59), thereby sparking a debate that included even source provenience as a point of contention (Koerper and Fife 1985). The controversy continues, focusing on the following related hypotheses: (1) jasper found at Tomato Springs, Orange County (Fig. 1), was procured by local entrepreneurs engaged in forays into the Mojave Desert or beyond to acquire unmodified stone weighing as much as 11.67 kg. and (2) the Tomato Springs site (CAOra-244) was the primary or sole center for production and distribution of artifacts of jasper in coastal southern California (Cottrell 1985). Two critiques of Cottrell's jasper procurement/trade scenario (Koerper et al. 1987; Shackley 1987) posed numerous questions regarding lithic procurement, resource control, and tool manufacture. A recent commentary (Cottrell and Wagner 1990) neglected most of the concerns proffered by Koerper et al. (1987) and Shackley (1987) but rather focused on macroscopic and microscopic examination of Tomato Springs material to conclude that the Ora-244 jaspers are allochthonous to the Peninsular Ranges and therefore must have come from either the Mojave or Colorado desert. Here, we discuss those important issues not addressed by Cottrell and Wagner (1990). Next, petrological, petrographical, paleontological, and geochemical observations are offered to support a hypothesis of local jasper procurement. Included are data derived from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive x-ray analysis (EDX) that indicate a high degree of correlation in morphology, crystallinity, and trace element chemistry between a sample of local float jasper and a debitage specimen from Ora-244.

Archaeological Investigations at CA-SBA-1809, A Protohistoric Settlement, Goleta, Santa Barbara County, California. Jerry D. Moore and Michael H. Imwalle. Salinas, CA: Coyote Press Archives of California Prehistory No. 19, 1988, vi + 69 pp., 7 figs., 13 tables, $6.20 (paper).

The Ute of Utah Lake. Joel Janetski. University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 116, 1991, 81 pp., 18 figs., $20.00 (paper)

The Forgotten Tribes: Oral Tales of the Teninos and Adjacent Mid-Columbia Indian Nations. Donald M. Hines, 1991, 143 pp., 23 illustrations, $10.95 (paper).

To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. Lucy Thompson. Foreword by Peter E. Palmquist. Introduction by Julian Lang. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1991, xxx + 292 pp., 42 illustrations, 2 maps, index, $12.95 (paper).

Tom-Kav: A Late Village Site in Northern San Diego County, California, and Its Place in the San Luis Rey Complex. D. L. True, Rosemary Pankey, and C. N. Warren. University of California Anthropological Records 30, 1991, xi + 240 pp., 152 tables, 73 figures, $40.00 (paper)

Ute Tales, Collected by Anne M. Smith, assisted by Alden Hayes, forward by Joseph Jorgensen. University of Utah Press, 1992, 175 pp., 20 photos, $24.95 (cloth).

An Archaeologist's Guide to Chert and Flint: Archaeological Research Tools 7. Barbara E. Luedtke, Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992, 172 pages, 2 appendices, bibliography, glossary, index, $18.75 (paper).

The Cahuilla Landscape: The Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains. Lowell John Bean, Sylvia Brakke Vane, and Jackson Young, with contributions by Bern Schwenn. Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 37, 1991, 116 pp., 15 figs., 11 maps, $14.95 (paper).

The Main Ridge Community at Lost City: Virgin Anasazi Architecture, Ceramics, and Burials. Margaret M. Lyneis. University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 117, 1992, ix + 96 pp., 22 figs., 71 tables (on 3 1/2" diskette, Microsoft Word 4.0 for Macintosh), $25.00 (paper).