Critical Insights on a Precarious Time: Shellmounds and Colonialism in the San Francisco Bay, California

Friday, January 2, 2015: 4:30 PM
Madison Suite (New York Hilton)
Tsim Schneider, University of California, Santa Barbara
Archaeologists are aware of the biases – including, silences, exclusions, and distortions – introduced when comparing historical documents to material remains. In a similar fashion, the archaeological record is subject to cultural and natural transformation processes that play a role in what gets preserved at an archaeological site and, consequently, what gets studied. Artifacts degrade, others preserve; things can be brought into a site, or carried away. In the San Francisco Bay area of California, more recent urbanization leveled and erased most coastal shellmound sites. As I discuss, research on the continued use of some shellmounds by Native Americans fleeing – or on leave from – Spanish missions, therefore, is fraught with challenges presented by historical and anthropological accounts of Native village abandonment and cultural loss, as well as archaeological misunderstandings attributed to a missing landscape. Overcoming these challenges, I believe archaeologists can more fully account for the places and practices at play during and after the missions and draw more meaningful connections between an often abstracted archaeological record and Native American communities who continue to reside within the landscapes of their ancestors.
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