Early Cultures

Shell Mounds and Mortuary Behavior in the San Francisco Bay Area

“…Mortuary behavior forms the core of chronological and cultural frameworks in central California Bennyhoff and Fredrickson, 1994;Milliken and Bennyhoff, 1993). For example, key traits of the successive Berkeley and Augustine patterns consist of "burial and ceremonial practices" (Bennyhoff and Fredrickson, 1994;Fredrickson, 1973Fredrickson, , 1994aMoratto, 1984). Based on the number and variations in grave goods, mortuary evidence has been used to infer increasing socioeconomic differentiation over time, with few burial goods in graves in the Berkeley Pattern, leading to more pronounced differentiation, as evidenced by considerable variation in grave goods, in the Augustine Pattern.…”

“…Based on an analysis of all prior excavations at the site, Bickel (1981) designated the earliest chronological unit at the base of the shell mound "Component III," which is temporally associated with the end of the Early Period, and culturally with the Berkeley Pattern (Bickel, 1981;Moratto, 1984). Nearly 100 burials associated with this component were excavated.…”

“…Bickel (1981), following Davis and Treganza (1959), suggested that a "basal cemetery" was comprised of approximately 50 of the graves in Component III. However, the "cemetery" concept, as derived from mortuary theory, was not used in Bickel's analysis, nor is it used in discussions of the archaeology of coastal central California (e.g., Moratto, 1984).…”

“…While it is difficult to generalize the situation at CA-ALA-328 to include all the larger shell mounds along the bay shore, it is worth noting again that basal deposits with burials are found beneath other large shell mounds, including West Berkeley (CA-ALA-307;Beardsley, 1954;Wallace and Lathrap, 1975), De Silva Island (CA-MRN-17;Moratto, 1984), and the Ponce Mound (CA-SCL-1; Beardsley, 1954). As Lightfoot (1997) points out, the lack of recognition and detection of cemeteries beneath shell mounds may be the result of the field strategies used to excavate shell mounds, since wide horizontal exposures are required to identify these features.…”

Quantifying the association of chipped stone crescents with wetlands and paleoshorelines of western North America

“…Specifically, we use a geographic information system (GIS)-based Euclidean distance calculation with digital reconstructions of pluvial lakes and paleoshorelines, site locations, and artifact distributions, to evaluate the proposed association of crescents with wetland habitats in Western North America during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene (TP/EH). During this time, wetlands were the focus of subsistence and settlement patterns in the Great Basin and interior California (Beck and Jones, 1997; Beck et al., 2002; Elston and Zeanah, 2002; Jones et al., 2003), as well as the California Coast (Erlandson et al., 2008b, 2011; Lightfoot, 1993; Moratto, 1984) where high-ranked food sources were especially abundant (Jones et al., 2003:7). The goals of our analysis are to contribute to a deeper understanding of crescents, their distribution, and the environmental conditions under which they were produced, used, discarded, and recycled.…”