By the beginning of Spanish colonization, indigenous Californians had developed an array of non-metal weapons, tools, and other material artifacts. They built watercraft, erected facilities for meetings and ceremonies, dug wells and irrigation channels, fashioned jewelry, and excelled in other crafts and art forms as well. Additionally, they engaged in an evergrowing commerce.
The Indians’ weaponry and tools were those of highly skilled Stone Age hunter-gatherers; any iron used was acquired from Europeans. Bows often were made from fir trees and ranged from 3 to 6 feet in length, the longer bows being better suited to distant targets. Among the Yuroks in the northwest, arrow shafts made of reeds and cedar wood were tipped with sharp volcanic glass points. On entering a human body the arrow point shattered on the bone, causing festering followed by severe infection and death. Northern Indian arsenals also included wooden clubs, obsidian hatchets, lances, and javelins. Indian tools consisted of obsidian knives, deer-bone punches, sticks for lighting fires, woodworking adzes (sharp-edged cutters), mauls, and wedges. Fishing and marine mammal hunting required equipment such as nets, hooks, and harpoons. Mortars and pestles, shaped from stones, were used by many tribelets to pulverize acorns and other plants used in cooking.
Some tools, such as adzes, were particularly useful in boat-making. Long before European contact California’s Indians had been building seaworthy redwood dugout and plank canoes, as well as tule boats for inland waterways. Tribelets living along the northwest coast, in the vicinity of Humboldt Bay, dug out half of a redwood log to build canoes that they used in coastal waters and the interior reaches of the Eel River. In coastal southern California the Shoshonean and Chumash islanders constructed plank canoes that were exclusively maritime watercraft. These vessels were used to hunt seals, sea lions, and dolphins for subsistence, as well as for transport between the mainland and the Channel Islands. For fishing and transport, Indian groups utilized Tule balsa boats, constructed from hand-twined marsh plants, in coastal wetlands and inland waterways.
In addition to boat-making, roundhouses, sweathouses, granaries, and irrigation projects attested to native construction skills. A roundhouse was a large, circular, woodframed structure, part of which was below ground while the top was supported by rafters and covered with earth. It was used for rituals. Sweathouses served as ceremonial centers and men’s saunas. The sweathouse consisted of a sealed room heated by an open fire. When sufficiently hot, males exited and bolted to nearby ponds of cool water and submerged themselves. These rituals were intended to cleanse the body of scents that could alert game to a hunter’s presence as well as to appeal to spirits in nature. Women in the central region customarily built thatched granaries for food storage, some of which reached 15 feet in height. The Owens Valley Paiutes used communal labor to dig irrigation ditches and dam streams to enhance the productivity of edible wild plants.
In basketry California’s Indians were virtually unsurpassed worldwide. Women dominated the craft and art form; Pomo males were the only ones of their gender to make baskets. These portable containers had multiple uses: gathering, storage, and cooking of food; the carrying of infants; headwear; ritual observances; and commerce. They often featured geometric and animal designs. Some were so tightly woven that they could carry water, even without tar caulking, and be used for cooking. Pomo baskets were particularly ornate, exhibiting intricate designs coupled with decorative feathers and inlaid mother-of-pearl.
Clothing was fashioned from sea otter, rabbit, and deer skins, as well as plant materials; the latter also were used by men and women for body painting. In summer men often wore nothing, while women dressed in skirts made of plant fibers. Both sexes covered themselves in furs during colder periods of the year. Special rituals called for more elaborate apparel: feathered headdresses and capes, shell necklaces, and jewel and shell earrings. Footwear for most northern tribelets consisted mainly of moccasins; southern groups preferred sandals. Body tattoos, sported by men and women, were common in Indian California. Yurok girls, for example, received facial tattoos beginning at age 5. Black stripes were etched into the skin from the corners of their mouths to below their chins. Every five years another line was added, making clear their age. Imagine what age-concealing women in the Western world would have thought about that practice!
Indian art was gendered. Just as women excelled in basketry and costume design, men dominated wood and bone carving, storytelling, music, and rock-carving (petroglyphs) and rock painting (pictographs). Most of these art forms were practiced widely, though the petroglyphs and pictographs were limited to the interior parts of southern California. The Chumash were particularly adept at executing these artworks. Boulders and the walls of caves were used to carve and paint representations of humans, animals, and assorted abstract shapes - all of which usually derived from religious beliefs.
Some of the Indians’ material artifacts became articles of exchange in a steadily growing commerce. By the time of European colonization, native Californians had been carrying on a brisk trade with both neighboring and distant aboriginal groups. Surplus food, redwood dugout canoes, abalone shells, whalebone, baskets, and many of the weapons and tools mentioned above were both bartered and sold (often using shell currencies). Commercially, Indians exchanged their goods in a “greater California.” Trails crisscrossed and extended beyond California’s current borders into Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and the Baja peninsula of Mexico, thereby facilitating long-distance trade.
The near-absence of metal in aboriginal trade was an important factor in earlier assessments of the California Indians’ material culture. Coupled with the lack of a written language, unfamiliarity with the wheel, and relative non-use of animals as beasts of burden, the absence of metal instruments led some earlier whites to disparage the California Indians. Nineteenth-century fur trappers and, later, some writers viewed the natives as culturally and racially inferior to Euro-Americans and other North American indigenes. They often used the term “Digger” when referring to Native Californians, some of whose women used pointed sticks to unearth roots and wild vegetables, presumably for food. Only primitives, many whites believed, would subsist on such a crude diet. The term “Digger” was a racist misnomer since the plant material that California Indians dug up was used mainly for basketry, though they ate some roots and bulbs. More importantly, white Americans’ use of the term showed little understanding of the wide array of Indian foods and the natives’ sophisticated grasp of plant ecology. Dehumanizing California’s aborigines in this fashion made it easier to divest them of land and other resources. In recent decades scholars have repudiated this older view and recognized the modern environmental stewardship at the heart of the natives’ material culture.
World History
