BiblioVault - Books about Chumash Indians

A Canyon through Time

Archaeology, History, and Ecology of the Tecolote Canyon Area, Santa Barbara County, California

Jon M Erlandson

University of Utah Press, 2008

Long a refuge for bootleggers and hobos, Tecolote Canyon was engulfed by an industrialized oil boom for twenty years beginning in the 1930s, and endured the only Japanese attack on the contiguous U.S. during World War II. In the postindustrial era, the lower canyon was a haven for surfers, nudists, and gravediggers before being transformed into a five-star resort in the 1990s. But this beautiful area of California’s Santa Barbara coast has been occupied by humans for at least 9,000 years.
Known by the Chumash Indians as Hel’apunitse (guitar fish), the canyon was a major nexus of Chumash village life from about 2000 to 500 years ago. After the arrival of Europeans, the canyon passed from Chumash hands through successive Spanish, Mexican, and American administrations.

In A Canyon through Time, the authors summarize the deep history of this beautiful canyon, which serves as a fascinating history in microcosm of the California coastal region. Using data from archaeology, ecology, geology, geography, and history, they weave an interdisciplinary tale of the natural and human prehistory and history of the Tecolote Canyon area.

[more]

Earth Wisdom

A California Chumash Woman

Yolanda Broyles-González and Pilulaw Khus

University of Arizona Press, 2011

Pilulaw Khus has devoted her life to tribal, environmental, and human rights issues. With impressive candor and detail, she recounts those struggles here, offering a Native woman’s perspective on California history and the production of knowledge about indigenous peoples. Readers interested in tribal history will find in her story a spiritual counterpoint to prevailing academic views on the complicated reemergence of a Chumash identity. Readers interested in environmental studies will find vital eyewitness accounts of movements to safeguard important sites like Painted Rock and San Simeon Point from developers. Readers interested in indigenous storytelling will find Chumash origin tales and oral history as recounted by a gifted storyteller.

The 1978 Point Conception Occupation was a turning point in Pilulaw Khus’s life. In that year excavation began for a new natural gas facility at Point Conception, near Santa Barbara, California. To the Chumash tribal people of the central California coast, this was desecration of sacred land. In the Chumash cosmology, it was the site of the Western Gate, a passageway for spirits to enter the next world. Frustrated by unfavorable court hearings, the Chumash and their allies mobilized a year-long occupation of the disputed site, eventually forcing the energy company to abandon its plan. The Point Conception Occupation was a landmark event in the cultural revitalization of the Chumash people and a turning point in the life of Pilulaw Khus, the Chumash activist and medicine woman whose firsthand narrations comprise this volume.

Scholar Yolanda Broyles-González provides an extensive introductory analysis of Khus’s narrative. Her analysis explores “re-Indianization” and highlights the newly emergent Chumash research of the last decade.

In the world of book publishing, this volume from a traditional Chumash woman elder is a first. It puts a 20th (and 21st) century face, name, identity, humanity, personality, and living voice on the term Chumash.

[more]

Foragers on America's Western Edge

The Archaeology of California's Pecho Coast

Terry L. Jones and Brian F. Codding

University of Utah Press, 2018

The California coastline has long been of interest to archaeologists. This book directs attention to the largely ignored Pecho Coast, a rugged, isolated, 20 km long peninsula between modern-day Morro Bay and Pismo Beach. Archaeological work along this stretch was last synthesized in 1972. Jones and Codding now bring together the extensive contract work and field school studies of the intervening years, shedding new light on the region’s early inhabitants.

The first people of the Pecho Coast were part-time residents who exploited shellfish, fish, and marine birds, including the flightless duck, Chendytes lawi, which sustained hunting drove to extinction ca. 2800 cal BP. This marked the only unequivocal case of prehistoric, human-caused extinction in western North America. Cold, productive seas allowed inhabitants to weather droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (950–600 cal BP), after which shell beads became increasingly abundant, representing either the initial appearance of Chumash-speaking peoples or attempts by Chumash leaders to consolidate power through gifting, reciprocal exchange, or forced conquest. During the mission era, fishing sustained the Native community as, for the first time, individuals became fully sedentary, foraging within a limited radius to avoid contact with the Spanish.

This record reveals a unique story of local adaptation, anthropogenic habitat change, social differentiation, and, ultimately, resistance to colonial invasion.

[more]

Origins Of A Pacific Coast Chiefdom

Jeanne E Arnold

University of Utah Press, 2001

When Europeans first visited California, they encountered one of the most culturally diverse regions of the New World. The coasts and ecologically richest areas were dotted with small polities which were supported not by horticulture but exclusively by hunting, fishing, and gathering, placing them among the more complex hunter-gatherer groups in the world.

The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom considers the Chumash, perhaps the most hierarchically organized of the California groups. It explores the final thousand years of coastal Chumash culture, which culminated in the complex society witnessed by the earliest Spanish explorers.

Chumash life was characterized by settled villages, massive production of prestige goods, sophisticated plank canoes, and extensive maritime exchange systems—features more characteristic of agricultural societies. Archaeological sites in the island Chumash area are exceptionally well preserved, permitting precise interpretations of both subtle and major changes in technologies, subsistence, prestige goods, and specialized shell and lithic industries. The data and interpretations presented here are the result of fifteen years of intensive investigation on the Channel Islands.

[more]

The Prehistory of Morro Bay

Central California's Overlooked Estuary

Edited by Terry L. Jones, Deborah A. Jones, William R. Hildebrandt, Kacey Hadick, and Patricia Mikkelsen

University of Utah Press, 2019

Morro Bay is one of more than thirty major estuaries where prehistoric people thrived along the California coast, yet for much of the twentieth century these systems were deemed insignificant within the broader outline of New World prehistory. Recent research, however, has shown that estuaries were magnets for human occupation as early as 10,000 years ago. This book combines archaeological data from large-scale excavations completed between 2003 and 2014 with other studies from Morro Bay to reveal a heretofore overlooked yet remarkable history of cultural change and adaptation. Over the last 8,000 years, as the bay evolved toward its current configuration, inhabitants endured earthquake and drought, regularly adjusting their settlement practices but continuing to fish and collect shellfish. Their populations slowly grew against a backdrop of extreme resource diversity and diachronic habitat variation, ultimately leaving behind evidence of a unique human-estuary ecological saga.

[more]