A. L. Kroeber.
The History of Native Culture in California. [excerpt]
from: University of California Publications: American Archeology
and Ethnology (1923), 20:125-142
The people of this era almost certainly comprised the ancestors of the modern Hokans, perhaps of the Penutians. Algonkins and Athabascans are more doubtful; Shoshoneans had not yet entered. Among the Hokans, the Yuman division may still have been in touch with its congeners of the central Californian district; at any rate its habitat was scarcely that of the present. The northern Hokan divisions---the ancestors of the Chimariko, Karok, Shastan groups, Yana, Washo---were more widely spread than now.
The culture of all these peoples rested essentially on a food supply of seeds, especially the acorn, helped out by mollusks on the coast, fish, small game, and deer in the interior. The plant foods were crushed with stone pestles in stone mortars, stored, prepared, and cooked in baskets of twined weave, much as now. Wickerware, which is little used at present, may have been made then. Weirs, traps, and nets were worked in textile and cordage processes. The nets ran to rather large seines, weighted by stones. The fishing harpoon with detachable head, and the rush balsa, may have been already known. Wood was worked, at least split, with horn wedges; implements made of it must have comprised self-bows, and perhaps clubs, tubular tobacco pipes, and food stirrers.
The sweathouse is likely to have been in use much as we know it: a permanent structure, fire heated, entered nightly. To have served its purpose adequately, it could scarcely have been other than earth-roofed. The construction may therefore have been applied also to dwellings; but in the main, houses were probably of bark slabs or thatch on a frame of light poles.
The dead were buried, perhaps cremated here and there. They were feared more for their physical contacts than as spirits. Their names were not uttered. There was also a prejudice against the free use of the names of the living. Birth taboos were observed.
The principal dance, besides one of triumph over the heads of fallen foes, was that held for every adolescent girl, who endured a series of restrictions during the rite. For instance, she might not scratch her head nor eat meat. Religion was influenced largely by shamans who derived their power from actual or fabulous animals or celestial phenomena. They may have possessed stone charms. Besides curing and causing disease, they attempted to produce abundance of food, for the community as well as themselves; but these efforts were as yet unaccompanied by communal rituals.
The people lived without exogamic divisions, under chiefs who headed groups of kinsmen or small bodies united by coresidence. So far as descent was weighted at all, which was not often, it ran in the male line. Polygyny was tolerated and practiced. A man married his wife's sister or kinswoman, before or after her death; the widow married her husband's kinsman.
Culture elements from the coast to the north and the interior highland to the southeast of California now began to penetrate. In each case they were worked into the existing culture. The northern influences seem to have been earlier and more effective, so far as they reached; but they scarcely affected more than the northern third of the area. Over this third, culture was comparatively uniform.
The northern house in this period commenced to be of frame construction, though still rudely made of bark slabs rather than planks. Some form of canoe must have been in use. Along with it, skill in woodworking developed. Basketry was commencing to refine on its old basis of twining. Possibly ornamentation in overlaying was practiced. At any rate, basketry was being put to special uses---cradles, caps, and the like. A woven hopper on a slab replaced the mortar. Shamanism was taking on a character of its own. The shaman's power was no longer derived so much from animals as from intangible spirits of localities. The novice in the art was aided by older men in a shaman-making dance. Shamanistic food-supply rites were slowly being elaborated, especially in connection with the salmon run. Society remained as unorganized as before, but possession of property and public influence were beginning to be correlated, and marriage was by purchase.
The Athabascans or Algonkins or both are likely to have entered northern California in this era; perhaps the Penutians were spreading along the Sacramento drainage. As a result of these movements, the Hokans were shifted and separated. The Athabascans came from the north; but, moving more slowly, or at least more intermittently, to judge by the preponderance of precedent, than knowledge and institutions diffused, they were not, in all likelihood, so much the carriers of the new elements of culture that were pervading northern California, as newcomers who found themselves in familiar social environment. The Algonkin ancestors of the Yurok and Wiyot are likely to have come down the Klamath. This movement would bring them out of a hinterland at a time when lapse and remoteness had deprived them of eastern Algonkin culture. Thus they too could not well have contributed much of novelty to the life of the region they were entering.
In the larger southern two-thirds of California the populational movements were less intricate. The Shoshoneans were probably spreading out of the Great Basin across the deserts toward the coast. They may have reached the ocean toward the close of the period. Here and there bodies of them that had come into intimate advance guard contacts with aliens were specializing their speech to become the ancestors of groups like the Tübatulabal or Cupeño. Culturally the Shoshoneans carried little into California: they could have had but little in the Basin. They did separate the southern from the central Hokans; and the break between the central and northern Hokan groups by Penutians may also have been effected during this period.
Most of the new civilizational elements in south and central California that can be assigned to the second era have Southwestern affiliations. They were of course not specific Pueblo elements. Pueblo culture was only beginning to organize; and even when organized it has never evinced a power of radiation equal to the degree of its development. Southern and central California at this time may be assumed to have used the unshaped metate alongside the mortar, and to have sewn coiled basketry. On the southern coast, shell beads began to be made in variety, and canoes were employed. Soon after the islands were reached and settled, the steatite industry may have had its inception, both as regards the manufacture of vessels and possibly also of ceremonial objects and ornaments. The beginnings of totemic sib organization perhaps fall in this period. Whether this took the form of moieties or clans, and whether these were exogamic or localized or not, is difficult to say. The emphasis is likely to have been on the totemic rather than on the organizational aspects of the system. In such groups as recognized descent, this was patrilineal. Shamanism had reached a stage of loose associations or public performances of coöperating individuals of the type of the rattlesnake ceremonies and shamans' contests of the San Joaquin Valley in the historic period. Rattlesnake and grizzly-bear shamans were commencing to be differentiated. The public mourning anniversary took form in this era and may have begun to creep northward. With it there is likely to have gone an accentuation of death taboos and perhaps a greater inclination to cremate corpses.
Population movements on a large scale cannot be established for the third era. The Shoshoneans no doubt continued to press southwestward, and many minor shifts must have taken place in the welter of groups in the north. In the main, though, the territories of the greater linguistic blocks were commencing to approximate their present configuration. Culturally, the flow from the North Pacific Coast and Southwestern areas continued; but its effects remained more restricted geographically than before; because the imported elements now reached local cultures of some activity both in the north and south, and were there worked over before being passed on; and also because an independent culture was beginning to arise in the middle region.
In the northwest this local differentiation seems to have been most rapidly consummated, and to have become quickly established and correspondingly limited in geography. Consequently it is difficult to distinguish this period and the next in northwestern California. The pure type of plank house, the high esteem of property, exact valuations and laws connected with property, the use of compulsive formulas in religion, the attachment of rites to particular spots, the belief in a prehuman race in place of a creator, all must have evolved to an appreciable degree during the third period.
In central California, especially its northern portion in and about the Sacramento drainage, the vague shamans' associations began in this period to grow into the Kuksu organization: a formal initiation was instituted and spirits began to be impersonated. More or less connected was a development of mythology, in which increased coherence in accounting for beginnings was attained and the concept of a supreme creator began to grow clearer. On the side of arts, the culture failed to progress perceptibly, except in basketry; which was being made with added refinement and in techniques and styles that varied somewhat from region to region. Totemism, accompanied by a moiety system and more or less cross-cousin or other special forms of marriage, and here and there affecting rites, names, honors, or chieftainship, prevailed chiefly but not exclusively in the southern part of the central area. The mother-in-law taboo spread over the whole of it in this period.
South of Tehachapi, the narcotic jimson weed or toloache (Datura) was beginning to be worked more significantly into religion, especially in connection with an initiating organization which was becoming too inclusive to be strictly shamanistic any longer. The ritual came to include in time the idea of the ground painting---the basic element of the altar concept of the Southwest. For some unknown reason---perhaps the barrier interposed by the lower Colorado tribes---the elaborate ritual costuming of the Southwest was not carried into California, or if so only feebly and soon to be lost. A simple standardized costume of feather skirt and head topknot came into use, to continue century after century with practically no modification. The developing jimson-weed ritual and existing mourning commemoration commenced to influence each other, the toloache cult concerning itself more and more with problems of human life and death and spirituality, and instituting special mourning rites for its members. From the Southwest, too, were derived tendencies to reckon the year calendar about the solstices; and to weld the bulk of each tribal mythology into a long, complex whole, beginning with the first male and female principles and continuing through a series of births of beings and a sort of national migration legend. The most conspicuous episode in this cosmogony was that of the death of a great god. This concept seems to have originated in Mexico and either to have passed by the ancestors of the Pueblos or to have been discarded by them because unconsonant with their ritual system.
The scheme of society fluctuated locally between recognition of moieties, clans, and totemism, without ever freeing itself from association with the idea of chieftainship. In material culture, the influence of the Shoshonean Great Basin began to be perceptible at this or that point. The water bottle of basketry, the cap, perhaps the carrying net, emanated from this quarter.
Pottery making, which was perhaps not introduced until later, had its source farther south: the region of the Gila and Sonora rather than of the Pueblos is indicated.
Along the Colorado, the bottomlands proved to be capable of sustaining a fairly large population as soon as agriculture was introduced from the Pueblos or more likely from Sonora; and agriculture remained thereafter the permanent basis of civilization. Physiography and climate, however, confined farming to the immediate river, thus concentrating the population into a uniform belt and marking it off sharply in customs from the inhabitants of the surrounding deserts and mountains. The narrowly localized and particularizing attitude characteristic of the remainder of California being effaced within the farmed tracts, settlements became fluid and lost their significance within true tribes. Had the civilization of these tribes been rich enough to support a real political organization, still further coalescence into a great nation might have ensued. As it was, they wasted one another in habitually sought wars, which absorbed much of their energy.
This growing emphasis on warlike undertakings did not interfere with the Colorado River tribes taking over from the New Mexican or Sonoran peoples such cultural elements as pottery, clan system, and prolix cosmogony, and passing them on to the groups nearer the ocean. For some reason, however, their military spirit and the civilizational distinctiveness enforced by their environment conflicted with other elements that came to them from the same source: the ground painting, for instance. These therefore traversed them without being able to make serious impression. Dreaming was evidently already established as the central idea and act in the religion of the river tribes. Why this should have been, we cannot see clearly. But the fact accounts for such elements as the altar, the dance, the recognized priest, not fitting in and therefore never taking firm root.
On the whole, then, the lower Colorado culture was the result of Sonoran influences being remodeled in a special environment. The product, compactly restricted within its physiographic confines, remained from an early date comparatively unreceptive to New Mexican influences, though without forming an impervious barrier to their spread.
In this period North Pacific and Southwestern influences continued to enter California. But as they reached cultures of ever increasingly integrated organization, these influences were absorbed less and less directly. The characteristic event in Californian civilization in this era accordingly was the growth of its specializations.
The duration of this final period should not be underestimated. In the sixteenth century Alarcon, Cabrillo, and Drake sketched the native life that they found in portions of the lower Colorado, southern California, and central areas. They did not of course describe with minuteness nor enter upon intricacies or matters of organization. Consequently we cannot be sure how many of their more subtle and elaborate modern traits the groups in question possessed when visited by these explorers. But the picture for each locality tallies so perfectly, so far as it goes, with that presented by the historic cultures of the same spots, as to force the conviction that rather little development occurred in the three to four centuries that followed their visits. Twice that duration thus seems a conservative estimate for the length of this period.
In the northwest, these were the times in which finish in everything technological attained its modern degree. Forms remained less developed: the distance from the center of North Pacific Coast artistic achievement was too great, and central California had no examples to contribute. But the boat was refined with gunwales, seat, and prow ornament of local design; and polished horn was increasingly employed for objects whose material at an earlier time was presumably wood. The caste system hardened, debt slavery began to exist, marriage purchases became more splendid and more formally negotiated, a greater number of possessions and activities were given economic valuations. Treasures or money as such assumed a larger part in life, as compared with merely useful things: dentalium shells from the north, obsidian from the east, ornaments of woodpecker crests obtained at home. The dances, whose esoteric part remained formulistic, afforded opportunities for the display of much of this wealth, thus rendering unnecessary a potlatch or credit system and perhaps preventing an introduction of this northern institution which might otherwise have taken place. The wealth in turn gave an added dignity to the festivals and enabled them to take on more definitely their ultimate character of world renewing or new year rites. The intensive localization of ritual, myth, magic, and custom was no doubt fostered in some measure by the assignment of economic and legal values to fishing places and nearly all tracts or spots that were specially productive. Fighting wholly lost the character of war and became a system of economically regulated murder for revenge.
Any remaining vestiges of scalping or the victory dance disappeared, and the war dance of incitement and negotiation of settlement prevailed exclusively. The idea of spirits as guardians diminished to the vanishing point; disease and cure were thought to be concerned mainly with self-animate pain objects; and shamans of importance were now always women.
In the central area, totemic sib organization perhaps began to decay. If it developed locally, it was without vigor. In religion, the movement of the two preceding eras toward cult organization gained in momentum. The rather widely spread Kuksu impersonations grew more elaborate, their combinations into great dances more numerous and spectacular, the earth-covered dance houses larger. Initiation into membership now was twofold: preliminary and full. The foot drum, split-stick rattle, and other paraphernalia, or such of them as did not go back to an earlier time, were introduced or at least associated with the Kuksu rites. In the heart of the area, about the lower Sacramento, a superstructure was reared on the Kuksu organization: the Hesi cult. The upper San Joaquin Valley was scarcely influenced in religion. Its southward remoteness preserved more ancient forms of ritual, or exposed it to partial permeation by the southern California toloache religion. Throughout the central province, in fact, the hill and mountain tribes took over only patches of the valley culture. Elements of civilization were accepted by them rather freely, organization of elements scarcely at all. Even in the active hearth of the culture, progress was mainly along the line of organization, elaboration, and integration. Aspects of civilization that did not lend themselves readily to making over in this manner-shamanism, for instance, adolescence rites, and many arts---remained primitive.
In basketry alone must we assume a notable progress per se. But this occurred independently in several parts. The effect thus was, as it were, centrifugal. The Pomo, the Maidu, the Washo, the Yokuts, each developed their own styles, technically and aesthetically. Single-rod coiling, lattice twining, feathering, bottleneck shapes are concrete examples among many slighter indications.
In southern California there was also a differentiation. At least as far back as the preceding era the Chumash seem to have begun to develop a special technological expertness, the Shoshoneans an interest in mysticism. The islanders, who in historic time were of both stocks, participated in both movements. Santa Catalina held the principal steatite quarries and was in close touch with the most favorably situated of the mainland Shoshoneans. It became therefore a radiant point. From it emanated the Chungichnish religion, superposed upon the basic toloache cults much like Hesi upon Kuksu, though its stress was laid more upon the meaning of symbols than their form. This religion had something of a propagandist spirit, which did not spend itself until after the introduction of Christianity, in fact was probably stimulated and possibly even induced by Christianity. World, birth, death, and soul mysticism flourished in belief and ritual. The basic world myth became more and more inclusive, the sacred ground painting took on its special features that mark it off from the Southwestern altar painting. As in the central province, shamanism, adolescence customs, and the like ancient institutions were little affected by these developments; only mourning rites grew ever more elaborate.
In the island and Chumash district the finest of the ornamental and ceremonial manufactures of steatite, hard stone, shell, and wood, as recovered by excavations, must probably be attributed to this late period. An increased refinement in the arts of basket making, feather working, and canoe carpentering seems also to have occurred.
Along the lower Colorado, two main events happened. The dream idea got such a hold on the culture as to associate itself with everything religious. Myth, song, shamanism, dance were all stamped deeply with its pattern. They assimilated increasingly. Everyone dreamed similar narratives and songs and sang the latter almost indiscriminately for a festival or a mourning, to cure the sick or to celebrate a victory. Secondly, the rather meager culture became so fixed as no longer to digest what might flow in from the pure Southwestern tribes. The dream concept in particular was again influential in this civilizational self-sufficiency and introversion. Being essentially an emphasizing of individual experience obtained in a certain way, dreaming engulfed shamanism as a separate activity; prevented associations or organizations; forbade the adoption of ritual apparatus or even curtailed such as existed; and thus caused the river tribes to do without masks, significant dance costumes, symbols, priests, sweathouses, or general use of jimson weed. Even the mourning commemoration became or remained abbreviated.
