Glossary

Bison antiquus Extinct Pleistocene ancestor of the American buffalo, Bison bison.

California pattern Hunting and gathering lifestyle fundamentally dependent on the acorn as a food staple.

Logistical strategy Settlement system that features a permanent or semipermanent residential village which serves as a home base from which seasonal resource collecting excursions are carried out.

Metate Stone slab with a coarse, flat-to-slightly concave surface used for grinding and pulverizing seeds and other plant products. Stationary compliment to the ‘mano’. Word of Uto-Aztecan origin.

Mano Hand-held stone used to grind seeds and other edible plant materials. Compliment to the ‘metate’. Word derived from Spanish ‘hand’.

Protoagriculture Purposeful manipulation of wild plants to increase their productivity. Includes culling, watering, pruning, and intentionally burning tracts of land to promote new growth. site furniture Artifacts purposefully left at selected site

Locations in anticipation of future use during scheduled return visits. Typically heavy or cumbersome tools. Firmly suggests habitual seasonal movements within a defined territory. tomoi Ocean-going canoe of the Chumash, southern California. Permitted deep-sea fishing and long-range trade, and was thus a significant source of wealth and prestige for its owner. Word derived from Chumash language.

Humans have been in all parts of modern California since at least the end of the Pleistocene Era, 10 000 to 14 000 years ago. Extinctions and other factors brought to an end the Ice Age focus on hunting of large game animals, and for the next 6000 years or more hunter-gatherers in California diversified their ways of life in adaptation to increasingly variable local environmental conditions. Regional cultural and technological adaptations were so successful that steady population growth was essentially universal, and population growth encouraged inventive measures to increase environmental productivity. Without the practical option of agriculture, many of California’s hunter-gatherers turned to the acorn 3000 to 4000 years ago. Until that time the acorn was little-used in California, perhaps as a ‘starvation food’, but regional population growth eventually warranted the complex leaching process needed to render the acorn edible. Thus began what archaeologists refer to as the ‘California Pattern’. This way of life is unified by the economic significance of the acorn, but is expressed in regional cultural histories and local adaptations so varied that California has become a premier location for studying hunter-gatherer diversity not just through time, but also over space. Geographic divisions of the sort shown in Figure 1 have a tendency to lump general culture histories, although it must be emphasized that significant intra-regional variability characterizes the prehistory of California.