9.1 INTRODUCTION
One of the purposes of this book is to think creatively about how archaeology can go beyond the written word to incorporate various kinds of non-literary ways of making history. This chapter examines the significant contributions that archaeology can play in constructing more refined interpretations of long-term human interactions with the environment using both literary and non-literary sources that transcend ancient and modern history. The time is right for critical rethinking of how we approach human/environmental relationships in the longue duree. All indications suggest that the next ten years will be known as the ‘green decade’. The growing concern with global warming and the many implications it has for the long-term health of the globe has unleashed an unprecedented interest in the study of human landscape modifications, particularly those that have transformed and shaped the environment through time. Archaeology is in an unparalleled position to make significant contributions to these contemporary concerns. No discipline is better suited to examine the long-term impacts of landscape transformations on local environments brought about by indigenous populations, colonialism, and modern Western capitalist enterprises (Crumley 1994; Grayson 2001; Jackson etal. 2001; Kirch 1996; Kirch and Hunt 1997; Marquardt 1994; Redman 1999; Rick and Erlandson 2008; Schmidt 1994).
In this chapter, I examine the distinctive ways that archaeologists investigate the environment in precolonial and colonial times. My point
Is that North American archaeologists often employ different approaches to the study of indigenous human relationships with the local environment depending on whether the time scale is before or after the coming of European colonists. These approaches, in turn, have significant implications for the kinds of archaeological and historical ecological studies undertaken on ancient and historic sites. But more importantly, the schism that currently exists in how archaeologists conceptualize the environment in precolonial and historical times has far-reaching implications for our contribution to other fields such as restoration ecology as well as for our collaboration with Native American tribes and other descendant communities. To illustrate my points, I present a case study about the current debate concerning indigenous management practices in native California.
9.2 RESTORATIVE ECOLOGY
A recent outgrowth of the study of human impacts to the environment is the field of restoration ecology: ‘Restoration ecology is an intentional activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity and sustainability. Frequently, the ecosystem that requires restoration has been degraded, damaged, transformed or entirely destroyed as the direct or indirect result of human activities’ (Society 2004: 1).
The ultimate goal of restoration ecology is to return degraded ecosystems to their historical ecological trajectories before significant impacts or disturbances took place. Although fundamental transformations to ecosystems might be caused by natural agencies such as floods, fires, or storms, the primary culprits in most restoration work are human modifications and impacts to the environment. The most damaging human-mediated impacts to the environment are thought to be of relatively recent age—that is, within the last two to three centuries. Global degradation of local environments has taken place with the increasing release of greenhouse gases, oceanic and atmospheric pollution, acid rain, and invasive species as well as unprecedented habitat destruction due to human urbanism and industrialized agrarian practices (Clewell and Aronson 2007: 5-7). These recent transformations are creating an unparalleled loss of biological diversity, indigenous species, native habitats, and open space in many regions of the world.
In addressing these problems, various forms of interventions are being employed in restoration projects to assist in the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded, damaged, or destroyed (Society 2004: 4). However, in contrast to earlier preservationist movements that focused on recreating an untouched form of nature, the goal of restoration ecologists is not necessarily to return biotic communities to a natural condition devoid of humans. As Clewell and Aronson (2007:5-6) emphasize, rather than restoring ecosystems to some kind of pristine state where humans only leave footprints, it is understood that humans are indistinguishable from nature. Historical ecological studies have been making this point for some years—that we need to take into account the multi-faceted relationships that human societies have had with biotic communities over the long term (Crumley 1994; Erlandson and Rick 2008; Marquardt 1994; Schmidt 1994). Furthermore, it is recognized that in some places across the globe, long-term human interactions with local environments may have enhanced the biodiversity and sustainability of ecosystems. Indigenous management practices, in particular, are acknowledged as a potential key factor in fostering ecosystem health and prosperity (Society 2004: 2). Consequently, the restoration of some ecosystems to a prior healthy historical trajectory might involve the incorporation of traditional knowledge about landscape management practices as part of the necessary interventions.
The practice of restoration ecology raises some intriguing questions for archaeologists. First, in restoring an ecosystem to its former historical state or trajectory, what particular temporal period will be selected? Will it be decades, centuries, or thousands of years ago? Second, no matter what time frame is selected as the goal for restoring the ecosystem, unless it is many thousands of years prior to human settlement of the region, then restoration ecologists must consider the potential influences of anthropogenic impacts to the environment. Not so long ago, it may have been possible for restoration ecologists to minimize the human element in the restoration of ecosystems by choosing a period of study that went back to a time when hunter-gatherer-fisher people occupied the landscape. However, recent archaeological studies demonstrate that human impacts to both maritime and terrestrial environments began early in the history of humankind (Jackson et al. 2001; Rick and Erlandson 2008).
A critical issue in the study of long-term human/environmental relationships is understanding when and why people such as hunter-gatherers and other low-level food producers (Smith 2001) impacted local habitats through the depletion and over-harvesting of resources in contrast to those times when they employed conservation measures that enhanced biodiversity and the health of local ecosystems (Erlandson and Rick 2008: 6-7; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 81-93). In some cases, the initial human colonization of ancient ecosystems appears to have resulted in species extinctions (Grayson 2001; Steadman 1995,2006). In other cases, growing human populations and changes in technologies and social organizations resulted in resource intensification and the over-harvesting of specific species, which had significant effects on local ecosystems (Broughton 1997, 1999; Jones 2002; Raab and Jones 2004; Raab etal. 2009). At other times and places, it appears that hunter-gatherers and low-level food producers may have used resource management strategies for enhancing the biodiversity and vigour of plant and animal resources employed as sources of food, medicine, and raw materials through prescribed burning, pruning, tillage, and other such activities (Boyd 1999; Erickson 2006; Lewis 1982, 1985; Peacock and Turner 2000; Stewart 2002). I argue that it is precisely these latter cases of indigenous landscape modification that may present the most critical sources of information for restoration ecologists for understanding how humankind may have worked with nature to augment and even create healthy, productive, and sustainable environments in the past.
California is a case in point. A major problem facing contemporary California is an alarming increase in fire frequency and severity that is putting life and property in harm’s way in both urban and rural areas. In 2008 alone, California experienced more than 4,000 wildfires, momentous conflagrations that destroyed homes and property over thousands of hectares, prompting the State of California to declare a twelve-month fire season, with grave implications for government budgets and land use issues. Recent work by anthropologists and environmental historians suggests that these firestorms may be the consequences, in large part, of the termination of indigenous landscape management practices. They argue that Californian hunter-gatherers employed prescribed burning and other management techniques to create rich mosaics ofhabitats across local areas (Anderson 2005; Bean and Lawton 1976; Blackburn and Anderson 1993; Lewis 1993; Shipek 1977). The landscape management strategies of native Californians are argued to have resulted in widespread, domesticated environments that greatly increased the biodiversity and productivity of many faunal and floral resources that were used by hunter-gatherer communities for foods, medicines, and raw materials. These scholars believe that the long-term survival of specific types of habitats in California, including grasslands, oak woodlands, and montane meadows, may be dependent ultimately on indigenous management methods to maintain their health and vigour. Furthermore, they contend that major firestorms in the past were reduced in native California by keeping fuel loads low through indigenous management practices of frequent, small, low-intensity burns.
9.3 ARCHAEOLOGY’S PLACE IN RESTORATION ECOLOGY
Archaeology can and should play a major role in the emerging field of restoration ecology. In serving as a central pillar in studies of human/ land relationships, archaeology can bring together diverse kinds of data about human cultural practices and human interactions with local environments that go back many hundreds and even thousands of years (Crumley 1994; Erlandson and Rick 2008; Schmidt 1994). Archaeological projects, particularly those involved in precolonial studies of indigenous populations, routinely gather information not only on the cultural parameters and organizations of local groups for specific time periods, but also undertake detailed historical ecological investigations of the regional distribution and availability of floral and faunal resources, along with other pertinent observations about regional environmental conditions, such as sea water temperature, salinity, atmospheric temperature, precipitation, etc. (Hildebrandt and Levulett 2002; Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002; Jones et al. 2008; Kennett 2005; Kennett and Kennett 2000; Raab and Larson 1997; Raab etal. 1995, 2009; Rick et al. 2005).
Much of this historical ecological information is potentially of great use to restoration ecologists and others attempting to model various ecosystem parameters (e. g., structure, composition, function, and biodiversity) for the period of time chosen for restoration. The combination of archaeological and historical ecological investigations may also provide critical information for scholars who are trying to measure the kinds of both negative and positive influences that indigenous populations may have had on local environments through time. It is possible that the integrated perspectives provided by archaeology and historical ecology may help in refining the time line for restoration ecologists to select the temporal period, indigenous landscape practices, and ecological parameters that they are interested in recreating.
A major benefit for archaeologists working on restoration projects is that they will facilitate greater collaboration with indigenous populations. Known as indigenous or collaborative archaeologies, the construction of shared partnerships with descendant communities and other people with vested interests in the archaeological remains of local places is transforming the broader discipline of archaeology in Africa, North America, and elsewhere (for examples, see Aguilar and Preucel, Gould, Hantman, Mrozowski, this volume).
Hantman (this volume) refers to this transformation as the ‘quiet revolution that is indigenous archaeology’, and as exemplified by the chapters in this volume, it concerns renewed attention to such topics as ancient and recent histories, our conceptualization of time, place making (‘history in sites’), oral histories/oral traditions, and native identities and tribal recognition in today’s world.
Another topic that will encourage future collaboration among archaeologists and tribal scholars is examining the state of the local environment and the health of indigenous plant and animal resources that continue to be employed as food, medicine, and raw materials for making baskets, ceremonial regalia, and other cultural objects. The availability of these resources and their ready access to tribal members are of vital concern to many indigenous populations who rely on them for performing traditional ceremonies and dances, for producing gifts, and for offering the appropriate kinds of foods at feasts and gatherings.
I believe that working with local tribal groups on restoration ecology projects can help build the foundations for long-term collaborative partnerships. Furthermore, collaborative restoration projects provide an integrative framework for obtaining diverse kinds of information about indigenous floral and faunal populations and how to sustain their diversity and propagation in local ecosystems. Tribal members of the research team may provide critical information about indigenous management practices drawn from their own daily activities, their oral histories, and the oral traditions of the broader tribal group, while archaeologists and ecologists, in turn, can provide archaeological and environmental data from field and laboratory research.
The ultimate goal of collaborative research between tribes, archaeologists, historical ecologists, and restoration specialists, of course, is to produce a deliverable and tangible product that will benefit the longterm vitality of local biotic communities. These kinds of projects provide the opportunity for archaeologists to make relevant contributions about contemporary issues of concern to government agencies and local communities who are troubled about the further degradation and destruction of habitats that support indigenous plants and animals in wild lands and open space. For example, there is now discussion among government and private non-profit agencies about the role that California hunter-gatherers may have played in managing fire regimes in the past and whether such management practices may have curtailed large-scale, high-severity firestorms (Carle 2008; Sugihara et al. 2006). There is growing recognition that when taken in concert with modern range and forest management protocols, lessons learned from native landscape practices may provide viable options for managing the state’s wild lands by minimizing fuel loads, increasing the biodiversity of indigenous plant and animal species, and maintaining or restoring some of California’s coveted vegetation types, such as oak woodlands, coastal prairies, and grasslands (Fowler et al. 2003; Nicola 1995; Ruppert 2003).
9.4 THE PREHISTORIC/HISTORIC DIVIDE
In recognizing the important contributions that archaeology can make to collaborative research programmes involving historical ecologists, descendant communities, and restoration specialists, we face a major structural problem in implementing these interdisciplinary studies. This problem concerns the kinds of archaeological practices that are typically employed in historical archaeology in contrast to other kinds of archaeology involving the study of ancient history. Much has already been said about the prehistoric/historic divide in archaeology and the theoretical and methodological problems that stem from the compartmentalization of research programmes with tight chronological and epistemological boundaries (e. g., Lightfoot 1995; Schmidt 2006, this volume; Schmidt and Patterson 1995b). While considerable progress has been made in breaking down this barrier, particularly in research on native and colonial entanglements, many problems still persist as outlined in other chapters of this volume.
The problem I address here concerns the rupture that remains in North American archaeology about how we conceptualize native interactions with the environment before and after the historical period, here defined as the time of European exploration and settlement. Although major advances have been made in the archaeology of colonialism that incorporate long-term native histories in the study of colonial entanglements that transcend the prehistoric/historic divide, such is not the case for the study of indigenous landscape uses and practices. There is still a major disconnect in how archaeologists conceptualize native interactions with the environment in precolonial and historical times in California as outlined below.
Archaeologists working in precolonial California expend considerable effort in understanding hunter-gatherer subsistence and settlement systems on a regional scale. Various kinds of theoretical models drawn from evolutionary ecology and historical ecology are used to examine the interactions of native groups with specific aspects of the environment, such as the exploitation of optimal and secondary resources within the broader region or catchment range, the transformation from foraging to collecting strategies, the employment of logistical task groups, and strategies involving resource intensification (e. g., Basgall 1987; Erlandson 1994; Erlandson and Rick 2002; Erlandson et al. 2005; Hildebrandt and Levulett 2002; Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002; Jones 1991, 2003; Raab etal. 2009; Rick etal. 2001, 2005). Yet this emphasis on interactions between hunter-gatherers and the environment tends to evaporate in archaeological studies of the historical period. With the colonization of California by Spaniards, Russians, Mexicans, and later Americans, the focus of environmental research by historical archaeologists and related scholars shifts to the study of massive landscape transformations brought about by colonial regimes involving the invasion of foreign flora and fauna, the advent of intensive agrarian and livestock production, and global-scale mining and timber extraction activities (e. g., Crosby 1986; Lightfoot 2005: 86-8; Preston 1997).
Unfortunately, research on the use and possible management of the broader landscape in historical times by indigenous populations all but disappears when the time frame of study shifts to the first Spanish and Russian settlements in California. The accent is now on native entanglements with colonial invaders and examining how indigenous people negotiated and responded to different kinds of colonial regimes (e. g., missionary, mercantile, military), diverse forms of colonial labouring practices, and various types of enculturation programmes (Lightfoot 2005). With their incorporation into colonial settlement systems as labourers, minority populations, and/or outcasts, the emphasis is no longer on studying how native peoples maintained their relationships with biotic communities. Rather, studies of human ecology now shift to colonial interactions with the environment that resulted in radical ecological transformations brought about by the introduction of foreign species, livestock grazing, new kinds of agrarian practices, and irrigation systems.
Native people are commonly viewed as being embedded within the broader colonial system and no longer interacting with the environment on their own terms. California Indians, who provided the crucial labour force for both the Russian and Spanish colonizers in implementing their agrarian and ranching economies, served on the front lines of colonial entanglements with the environment in their capacity as agrarian labourers, livestock herders, crafts specialists, timber harvesters, and miners. This shift in the perception of native people as being the instigators of environmental interactions to secondary players in colonial times is reflected in the kinds of archaeological research conducted. The rich array of historical ecological research in California archaeology that highlights indigenous landscape practices declines substantially with the coming of foreign colonists. While scholars are still concerned with human interactions with the environment, the centre ofgravity for these studies shifts away from Indian communities to those of colonial urban settlements.
My own research at Colony Ross, the Russian mercantile enterprise in northern California (1812-41), exemplifies how archaeologists have not followed through with detailed studies of how native peoples maintained close interactions with the environment after the coming of European colonists. Rather than continue with a theme of how native people continued to employ various components of their hunting, gathering, and fishing economies, and how they impacted the local environment in historical times, my emphasis has been on what happened to indigenous communities when they were incorporated into the Russian colonial programme. Consequently, much of my effort has focused on the ultimate consequences of native men and women who worked for the Russians in agrarian and craft manufacture tasks or who cohabited with them in inter-ethnic households (Lightfoot 2005).
It is not clear why this significant rupture takes place in the study of native peoples’ interactions with the environment in precolonial and historical times, but several factors are probably at work. It certainly reflects divergent theoretical frameworks used in the study of hunter-gatherers in precolonial times (e. g., historical ecology, evolutionary ecology, optimal foraging models), in contrast to the approaches more typically employed in the historical period that stress social agency, resistance, practice-oriented approaches in archaeology, social memory, and various social processes involving creolization, ethnogenesis, and hybridity (for California examples, see Hull 2009; Lightfoot etal. 1998; Martinez 1998; Panich 2009; Russell 2011; Schneider 2010; Silliman 2001, 2004; Voss 2005, 2008; Wake 1997). It may also concern the methodological challenges of studying rapid pulses of environmental change during colonial times, issues that historical archaeologists working in non-indigenous, urban environments are currently exploring in other areas of North America. But ultimately, it probably reflects a perspective among scholars that detailed studies of native and environmental relationships are of little relevance in historical and modern times because indigenous populations have now been swallowed up by colonial regimes involved in ranching, agriculture, timber operations, mining, and commercial fishing. In these colonial settings, it would appear that researchers assume that traditional landscape management practices are no longer at play. One gets the sense that the plethora of precolonial hunter-gatherer landscape management practices ceased in historical times as the environment was overrun with foreign peoples, invasive weeds, free range cattle, extensive agrarian fields, and urban development, and as native peoples were put to work as vaqueros, agrarian labourers, builders, and maids in creating the new colonial order.
9.5 RETHINKING HUMAN/LAND RELATIONSHIPS IN HISTORICAL TIMES
The rupture that now exists in archaeological investigations of human/ environmental relationships in precolonial and historical times is not productive for the field of archaeology, for our collaboration with native peoples, or for our participation in projects involving restoration ecology. As Gould, Hantman, Lane, and Mrozowski emphasize in their chapters in this book, most tribal people do not conceptualize time as divided between prehistory and history, but rather view history as a continuum that spans from modern to ancient times that has no clear break. Most tribal groups with whom I have worked have a keen interest in pursuing a better understanding about how indigenous management practices were implemented, maintained, refined, and transformed throughout ancient, colonial, and later historical times.
It is important for archaeologists to rethink our conceptual framework about how indigenous people related to broader landscapes in ancient and historical times. We will need to incorporate longitudinal studies of hunter-gatherer practices that span the Early, Middle, and Late Holocene to gain a better perspective about the California landscapes that Spanish and Russian explorers and settlers first entered. I suspect that many of these places had already been modified and transformed over many centuries by indigenous populations, a factor that will need to be taken into account in restoration ecology projects. Furthermore, without a full comprehension of how indigenous anthropogenic environments were used, constructed, and maintained, we will not fully comprehend the creation of new kinds of hybrid habitats that resulted from the fusion of indigenous landscapes with new kinds of colonial practices.
In other words, without detailed investigations of these indigenous cultural practices, we will not appreciate how they continued to contribute to the creation of local ecosystems during colonial and postcolonial times. Finally, in recognizing the excellent, ongoing work emphasizing human/land relationships in prehistoric times, it is somewhat surprising that little research has been undertaken by California archaeologists on intentional landscape management strategies by hunter-gatherer groups. By minimizing the role that indigenous cultural practices have played in the creation of anthropogenic environments in ancient times as well as in the historical period, we may be ignoring various kinds of indigenous knowledge-making about landscape practices that may be of great use to us today—such as in the management of public wild lands by federal and state agencies.
9.6 HUNTER-GATHERER PRACTICES IN HISTORICAL TIMES
In rethinking the relationship between indigenous populations and the environment in historical times, it is important to note that recent archaeological studies are showing that native Californians continued to implement various hunter-gatherer practices, not only during the first decades of culture contact with European colonial regimes, but many years after local populations had been subjected to sustained colonialism, in some areas into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These traditional cultural practices appear to have been embedded within colonial settlement systems, including missionary programmes with rigorous enculturation practices designed to transform Indians into Catholic farmers (Lightfoot et al. 2006). Archaeological investigations of Indian neophyte quarters in Dominican and Franciscan missions in Baja and Alta California indicate that various components of hunting, gathering, and fishing were maintained. Excavations have revealed a diverse range of wild foods, including marine fish, shellfish, terrestrial game (e. g., deer, rabbits, squirrels), birds (e. g., quail, turkey, geese, ducks), occasional sea mammals, and such plant remains as hazel nuts, black walnuts, wild grapes, and acorns. These wild resources were often associated with indigenous tools and material objects, including lithic assemblages of flaked stone and ground stone tools, shell beads, worked bone artefacts (e. g., whistles, beads, awls, shaman’s sucking tubes), gaming pieces, and basketry impressions of water bottles, storage baskets, and matting (for a more detailed discussion of these findings, see Lightfoot 2005: 96-8).
The degree to which Indian neophytes employed indigenous foods in their menus and as sources of medicine and raw materials for objects probably varied among the missions in both time and space. During the formative years of the missions, before agrarian systems became well established, occasional crop failures necessitated that native neophytes revert back to hunting and gathering practices. Furthermore, the two southernmost Franciscan missions in Alta California (Mission San Luis Rey and Mission San Diego), along with the Dominican missions in Baja California, allowed a portion of the native population to remain in outlying native rancherias or villages, which provided them with excellent opportunities to hunt, gather, and fish (Jackson 1994: 34, 80; Lightfoot 2005: 65; Panich 2009). However, even among the Franciscan missions of northern Alta California, where much more stringent reduc-cion policies were implemented to force the majority of the Indian population to live either at the mission proper or in outlying ranchos and stations established by the padres, native people maintained regular access to wild resources while toiling in agricultural fields, herding livestock, and/or working in mission workshops.
Few details are known about hunter-gatherer practices in the Franciscan and Dominican missions. It is likely that, in some cases, outlying gentile Indians traded some wild foods and raw materials to native neophytes residing in the mission complexes. Panich’s (2009) study of Mission Santa Catalina in northern Baja California indicates that some of the objects found in the neophyte quarters were derived from distant sources. The geochemical analysis of obsidian artefacts links them to the San Felipe obsidian source, located about 100 km southeast of the mission, while Panich’s geochemical study of the mission ceramics indicates that some were manufactured from non-local clays. However, it is also possible that Indian neophytes initiated some form of modified hunter-gatherer seasonal round by leaving the mission complexes with or without the padres’ permission.
The mission padres allowed native people to return occasionally to their homelands during paseos or furloughs. Mission records indicate that native neophytes employed the paseo system to return home to give birth or to die, to see old friends, and to gather food, such as acorns, clams, and to hunt game (Newell 2009: 55-8; Schneider 2010; Timbrook etal. 1993: 133-4). Johnson (2005: 71) notes that the neophytes from Missions Santa Barbara and La Purisima participated in annual islay (holly-leafed cherry) and acorn gatherings, and that some neophytes maintained their occupations as fishermen in providing the mission with fresh seafood. In discussing the modified seasonal round practised in the missions, Newell writes:
To do so, Indians continued to pay attention to traditional seasonal cycles—the acorn harvest, shellfish season, annual duck migration—and in fact, Indians at Mission San Francisco may have privileged these traditional seasonal cycles over the new seasons introduced by the Hispanic colonists. This was certainly true elsewhere; Mission San Carlos lost more than three hundred fanegas of corn in 1799 because the baptized Indians at the mission had laid the harvested corn out in the mission square to dry and then left the mission on paseo. While they were gone, rains ruined the corn. Despite this devastating loss, the priests were unable to prevent the Indians from leaving the mission, sometimes in large numbers and for sustained periods. (2009: 58)
The findings of hunter-gatherer practices in the mission complexes raise the following question. If indigenous subsistence patterns remained embedded in the relatively tightly controlled mission system, then what was going on outside these colonial centres? Many neophytes did leave the missions without the permission of the padres. Some of these fugitives were eventually captured and returned to the missions by Spanish soldiers, but many remained free for months or years, or they simply disappeared into the hinterland and were never seen again. Estimates of the number of runaways that had eluded capture reported in the Alta California missions range between 5 and 10 per cent of the total neophyte population, and a much larger number probably made aborted or unsuccessful attempts at escape (Archibald 1978: 178; Cook 1976: 57-64; Lightfoot 2005: 90). Schneider (2010) has undertaken an innovative research programme in the greater San Francisco Bay that is examining places of refuge for Indian neophytes on paseos or who had left the missions without permission. He shows that ancient shell mounds, which had been used for many thousands of years as places of residences, ceremonies, and cemeteries, may have been periodically returned to during the mission period by Indian people. There is little question that the people who returned to these ancient sites during colonial times were implementing a diverse range of hunting, gathering, and fishing practices.
Archaeological investigations at the Russian outpost of Colony Ross in northern California also indicate that local Indians, including the Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok, who laboured in the mercantile establishment, maintained their access to wild foods and raw materials (Ballard 1995; Gonzalez 2011; Lightfoot 2005; Lightfoot et al. 1997; Martinez 1998; Wake 1997). We suspect that the diverse range of terrestrial game, molluscs, wild seeds and nuts, marine and freshwater fish, and sea mammal meats found in native villages were obtained through exchange with kin people living in outlying areas and/or gathered during modified seasonal rounds when they were not labouring for the Russians. It is also important to emphasize that native peoples’ participation in hunting and gathering activities continued in the later stages of colonialism, sometime after the Russians sold Colony Ross and moved back to Russian Alaska in 1841.
The recent study of the Me? tini Village site, an indigenous settlement situated in the Fort Ross State Historic Park, details the cultural practices of the Kashaya Pomo in the 1850s and 1860s, when they laboured in a local Mexican, and then later, American period rancho owned by William Benitz. The findings indicate that Me? tini residents processed, cooked, and consumed a diverse range of domesticated and wild foods (Lightfoot and Gonzalez in preparation). They utilized cuts of beef and mutton, as well as wheat, barley, and possibly peas, which were probably provided as rations by the Benitz rancho. The Kashaya Pomo also obtained wild game, particularly black-tail deer, gathered various shellfish (e. g., mussel, turban snails, chitons, limpets, abalone, barnacles) from the nearby rocky coastline, and collected a diverse range of seeds, including California Poppy, bluegrass, knotweed/dock, California Bay, and various families of pink (Caryophyllaceae), legume (Fabaceae), grass (Poaceae), rose (Rosaceae cf.), and nightshade (Solanaceae cf.) plants. Some coastal fishing took place, probably by hook and line from the rocky shoreline, as indicated by the presence of Cabazon and various species of rockfish.
9.7 LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
Recent findings about hunter-gatherer activities embedded within and outside colonial programmes in California, along with those maintained after many decades of sustained colonialism, raise a number of intriguing questions. How were these practices organized? Who participated in them? What technologies were employed? And what impacts did they have on local ecosystems? A critical question concerning restoration ecology projects is to what degree did native people implement landscape management practices that went beyond the prehistoric/historic boundary? For example, we know that some of the colonial programmes attempted to terminate management practices involving prescribed burning, such as the proclamation in 1793 by Governor Arrillaga of Alta California who prohibited all Indian people (neophytes and gentiles) from their age-old activity of burning grassland and forested habitats to enhance wild food productivity (Lightfoot 2005: 86-7). But how successful were the colonists in prohibiting these kinds of landscape management practices in historical times?
In rethinking the kinds of relationships that indigenous people had with the environment in historical times, we may develop a more effective conceptual framework for examining landscape management practices that span the ancient/historic divide. Detailed studies of native indigenous practices in historical times may provide glimpses of the kinds of management practices once employed in native California as well as the creation of new kinds of techniques and strategies employed specifically for use in colonial contexts. How traditional landscape practices were modified in colonial times and how rapidly these changed and took on new meanings in the last three centuries are questions that need to be addressed with future work. These kinds ofstudies may prove important in broader research programmes that would examine the degree to which native Californians managed local ecosystems across the ancient and historic divide, and the overall impact they have had on local biotic communities up to the present.
Research programmes that integrate the findings across precolonial and colonial times will be necessary to address the current debate about indigenous landscape practices in the ecological and anthropological literature. Prominent environmental scientists argue that the scale, frequency, and importance of indigenous landscape modifications have been greatly exaggerated in the anthropological literature. Thomas Vale (1998: 231) cautions that this anthropological perspective is creating a new myth about Indian people, one in which they modified and economically enhanced vast tracts of land. Vale and others do not question that some level of environmental impact was initiated by local hunter-gatherer groups, but they believe that only relatively small areas were typically modified. More importantly, they argue that significant transformations in the composition and structure of plant communities attributed to native Californian fire management practices can be best explained by natural, non-anthropogenic ecological processes. The basic vegetation patterns and habitat distributions in California, they believe, would have existed whether people were present or not (Bendix 2002; Parker 2002; Vale 1998, 2000, 2002).
Needless to say, this debate about the scale and influence of anthropogenic burning practices has significant implications for restoration ecology projects. Depending on the degree to which prescribed burning was employed in a local environment, it will influence the kinds of interventions that might be taken in reconstructing habitats and whether a greater propensity of fire-inhibited or fire-enhanced species might be restored in specific ecosystems. Unfortunately, no clear answers are found in the anthropological literature. As a consequence of federal and state fire cessation policies, native burning appears to have been mostly curtailed in many areas of the state by the time that early ethnographers, such as Alfred Kroeber and John P. Harrington, initiated their fieldwork in the early twentieth century. These scholars were unable to study native firing practices first hand. What they had to work with were memories of past fire applications based on interviews with tribal elders and earlier ethnohistorical accounts of Indian burning by European explorers or settlers (see Lewis 1993: 80; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 94-7).
I believe that our understanding of past fire management practices will remain limited until more comprehensive, interdisciplinary research programmes are developed that specifically address questions about the frequency, scale, and severity of native burning that span ancient and historical times. But these kinds of holistic programmes, which synthesize and critically evaluate relationships between ecological, archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources of data, have yet to be implemented in California. The current practice is for fire ecologists to work independently, documenting past fire regimes using techniques of analysing pollen, charcoal, and firescar dendroecology, while the anthropogenic uses of fire are gleaned separately from sporadic ethnographic and ethnohistorical observations. Archaeological data, with a few notable exceptions (Hammett 1991; Hammett and Lawlor 2004), have not yet been incorporated systematically into studies of past fire regimes or hunter-gatherer burning practices in California.
A re-energized archaeological discipline can play a significant role in examining native California fire management practices that span precolonial, colonial, and modern times by expanding the temporal boundaries of the discipline and the kinds of sources typically employed in research projects. Clearly, literary sources will provide important information to scholars in these kinds of studies—including historical maps, historical photographs, sequential aerial images, Spanish, Mexican, Russian, and American observations of native burning, and irregular ethnographic descriptions. But as exemplified by the current debate about the scale and importance of landscape management practices in California, we must go beyond these traditional literary sources to evaluate the problem. For example, Spanish and Russian ethnohistorical sources provide descriptions of Indian fires, but these observations tend to be sporadic with little detailed information about the frequency of burning, the size of parcels burned, and the overall impacts on biotic communities. As mentioned above, later ethnographic research provided few first-hand accounts of this practice since fire suppression policies were already in effect by the time most of these studies were conducted (see the discussion in Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 94-7).
We will need to incorporate non-literary forms of history that include native oral histories and oral traditions about fire management practices. As noted above, some of these perspectives may come from management practices that are being performed by tribal members today (Anderson 2005). Other perspectives about how natives worked with local environments may come from tribal histories as recounted by elders. Some Pacific coast groups maintain coherent memories about their past use of landscape management practices that provide excellent sources about anthropogenic fire regimes and other ways of tending the land (see Anderson 2005; Barrett and Arno 1999; Blackburn and Anderson 1993; Johnson 1999; Peacock and Turner 2000; Turner 1999). Some of this tribal information is now being incorporated into contemporary treatment plans for state and federal lands. Another important line of evidence maybe provided by tribal elders about their tribe’s participation in legally permitted landscape burning by ranchers in the early twentieth century, when native people working for the ranchers may have directed and employed the use of fire. It is possible that some of the traditional forms of fire management may be represented in these historic practices as remembered by tribal members and recorded in government fire documents (Timothy Babalis, personal communication, 2010).
Ecological and archaeological data obtained from both ancient and historical contexts will be foundational components of these interdisciplinary projects. The gathering of pertinent palaeoenvironmental data (e. g., pollen, starch grains, charcoal, phytoliths, firescar dendroecology, mollusc thin sections, and AMS dates) in precolonial, colonial, and modern sites will help clarify and contextualize fire histories as well as document vegetation transformations resulting from changes in fire regimes. Archaeological field and laboratory work can provide the necessary diachronic perspective for examining modifications in cultural practices and social organizations that may be related to landscape management practices associated with changing fire regimes and vegetation patterns (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 120-2). We are currently implementing such an interdisciplinary research programme funded by the National Science Foundation at Ano Nuevo State Reserve in central California that involves collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, California Department of Parks and Recreation, and various archaeological and ecological specialists at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the San Francisco Estuary Institute (Cuttrell et al. 2009; Light-foot etal. 2008/2009). We anticipate presenting updates on this project over the next few years.
9.8 CONCLUSION
This chapter addressed the rupture that remains in California archaeology about how we conceptualize native interactions with the environment before and after the historical period. I do not believe that this problem is specific to California but characterizes much of the archaeology currently practised in North America. There is a tendency for archaeologists and other scholars to discount the role that native people continued to play in interacting with and managing the broader landscape in historical times. As the California case study exemplifies, even native peoples who were deeply embedded in colonial settlement systems, such as the Dominican and Franciscan mission programmes of Baja and Alta California, continued to maintain a close connection with local habitats and resources and to employ modified forms of their hunter-gatherer practices. It is time for archaeologists to rethink the barrier separating history and prehistory when examining the relationship that indigenous peoples had with the environment. In breaking down this wall and using a suite of literary and non-literary sources for examining the impact that humans have had on the environment in the long term, archaeologists will be in much better shape for making significant contributions to restoration ecology projects and for laying more solid foundations for collaborative partnerships with Indian tribes. It will also provide us with the opportunity to work with public agencies and land managers on issues of relevance to the broader public that concern the management of wild lands and parks. Finally, in reconfiguring the archaeological discipline we may better address the current debate that concerns the scale, frequency, and impact of indigenous landscape management practices that spanned the ancient and historic divide in California and elsewhere.
World History
