Death, Mourning, and Accommodation in the Missions of Alta California.In Franciscans and American Indians in Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation,and Resistance

Spanish missions are seen by many indigenous people and scholars alike as sites of profound loss. Across the Borderlands of North America, the native individuals and families who entered mission establishments faced terrible and often lethal challenges posed by introduced diseases, strict labor demands, corporal punishment, and unsanitary conditions. In California, as elsewhere, death was part and parcel of the mission experience for many indigenous neophytes as well as the resident Franciscan missionaries. This chapter explores how native people and Franciscans in Alta California negotiated their divergent but deeply held views about what constituted proper death, burial, and mourning practices. These issues are examined using evidence drawn from pre-Contact archaeological sites, ethnographic information collected by early anthropologists, mission-era archaeological deposits, and from the writings of the Franciscans and other contemporary observers. I argue that native neophytes in Alta California persisted in honoring their dead in culturally appropriate ways while the Franciscans varied in their attitudes toward indigenous mortuary practices

Comment on “Contingent Persistence: Continuity, Change, and Identity inthe Romanization Debate” by Lara Ghisleni

Ghisleni adds an additional voice to the growing chorus of archaeologists dissatisfied with conventional approaches to understanding the material evidence for intercultural entanglements. Particularly troublesome in this regard is the stubborn idea that continuity and change are two mutually exclusive trajectories initiated at the moment of contact. Such formulations lead to a priori assumptions about material culture that limit the ability of archaeologists to trace the complex relationships resulting from such encounters. In seeking to break down the dichotomous thinking that has pervaded the archaeological study of the Roman Empire and its local instantiations, Ghisleni offers an alternative that treats continuity not as the simple replication of earlier practices but as both contingent and emergent. In other words, continuity is structured by the past, but the path taken ultimately reflects only one of many possible ways forward. Seeing continuity and change as mutually constitutive directs archaeologists away from teleological narratives and toward amore temporally sensitive method for understanding the complexities of identity and practice

Mission Santa Clara in a Changing Urban Environment

Since its secularization in the 1830s, Mission Santa Clara de Asís and its associated grounds have seen major transformations. These changes include the gradual abandonment of the mission by its native inhabitants, the Californio and early Anglo-American use of mission structures, as well as the founding and growth of Santa Clara College (now Santa Clara University) and the City of Santa Clara. Through the analysis of historic maps, photographs, and archaeological findings, this paper provides an overview of the far-reaching physical changes that have fundamentally altered the original mission-era landscape, including the mission churches, cemeteries, and neophyte village. Information is drawn from historical and archaeological investigations into the lives of Native Americans at Mission Santa Clara, as well as an ongoing project I am conducting with undergraduate students and faculty from the departments of Anthropology and Environmental Studies and Sciences to record historic structures and other features in a geographic information system, or GIS. The massive scale of landscape changes over the past two centuries provide important context from which to consider the implications of future development on the preservation and study of the physical remnants of Mission Santa Clara

Spanish Missions in the Indigenous Landscape:A View from Mission Santa Catalina,Baja California

Mission Santa Catalina was founded on the margins of the Spanish colonial frontier in northern Baja California, but over time it became an important place in the indigenous landscape of the region. Dominican friars established the mission at a crossroads of native interaction, and recent archaeological, archival, and ethnographic research suggests that indigenous mission neophytes continued to engage in dynamic social and economic relationships with other native groups throughout the colonial period. At the same time, however, the diverse native peoples who lived at Santa Catalina formed new bonds to each other and to the lands around the mission itself. Together, these two processes suggest that the mission’s neophyte population was not isolated from the broader indigenous landscape, and that although it was marginal from the point of view of the Spanish, Santa Catalina was—and continues to be—an important place in native Baja California

Total Station Mapping: Practical Examples from Alta and Baja California

The use of electronic total data stations for mapping archaeological sites is examined through two California case studies. Mission Santa Catalina, located in the high desert of Baja California, and a cluster of three shell mounds, located in a forest in the San Francisco Bay area, represent two different examples of organizing and implementing a mapping program using a total station. In this article, we will discuss the basic use of total stations for mapping archaeological sites and provide an overview of the process of creating digital maps from data obtained using a total station. The two case studies will offer in-depth consideration of different data collection strategies and techniques used for the production of digital maps, and we stress the broad application of total stations for accurate and efficient mapping in a variety of study settings

Gallium and thallium NMR study of phase transitions and incomemensurability in the layered semiconductor TlGaSe2

Journal ArticleWe report on the first NMR study of phase transitions and incommensurability in the layered semiconductor TlGaSe2. 69,71Ga and 205Tl NMR data from a powder sample show phase transitions at 118, 108 and around 69 K. The 69Ga and 71Ga spin-lattice relaxation times T1 are short and nearly temperature independent in the temperature range 118 to 108 K, which is characteristic of an incommensurate state. The nuclear magnetization recovery in this temperature range can be fit by two components having different time constants. The ratio of the amplitudes of the components varies with temperature. Such behavior is consistent with the coexistence in this temperature range of two different macroscopic domains, such that one of the domains becomes energetically favored on cooling. The phase transition into a ferroelectric phase at 108 K appears to be accompanied by a displacement of Tl atoms

Special Feature Introduction: Indigenous Persistence in Colonial California

There are more than one hundred federally recognized Native American tribes found within the present-day borders of California, a roughly equivalent number of indigenous Californian communities who are either unrecognized or currently petitioning for recognition by the United States government, and another eight indigenous reserves just across the international border in Baja California, Mexico. This impressive array of more than 200 Native American communities is not surprising, given what oral narratives, early ethnography, and precontact archaeology tell us about the densely populated sociopolitical landscape comprised of many hundreds of small-scale autonomous tribes that existed before colonization in the late-1700s. Separating these two eras of Native California, however, is the colonial period—a time when indigenous peoples faced directed culture change in the Spanish missions, joined multiethnic communities at mercantile outposts, and suffered greatly due to disease, violence, and the disastrous policies of elimination enacted during the early American period

The Archaeology of Native American Persistence at Mission San José

Archaeological investigations at Mission San José in Fremont, California, have revealed large areas of the mission landscape, including portions of two adobe dwellings in the mission’s Native American neighborhood. Preliminary synthesis of previous and ongoing research at Mission San José focuses on the implications of archaeological evidence for understanding the persistence of indigenous cultural practices under missionization. Materials considered include flaked stone artifacts, shell and glass beads, modified ceramic disks, and faunal and floral remains. Our findings suggest that native people rearticulated various practices within the mission, but did so in ways that were consistent with existing traditions and cultural knowledge

Nuclear spin diffusion in the semiconductor TlTaS3

We report on a 203Tl and 205Tl nuclear magnetic resonance study of the chain ternary semiconductor TlTaS3. We show that spin-lattice relaxation in this compound is driven by two contributions, namely by interactions of nuclear spins with thermally activated carriers and with localized electron spins. The latter mechanism dominates at lower temperature; at that, our measurements provide striking manifestation of the spin-diffusion-limited relaxation regime. The experimental data obtained allow us to estimate the spin diffusion coefficient.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

The Marine Radiocarbon Reservoir Effect in Tomales Bay, California

This paper examines the marine reservoir effect for Tomales Bay, a 25.5-km-long tidal estuary along the northern coast of California. We determined the regional ∆R through radiocarbon (14C) measurements of pre-1950 shells from a museum collection as well as archaeologically recovered shell samples from a historical railroad grade of known construction date. These results are compared against four sets of paired shell and bone samples from two local archaeological sites. Our results indicate little spatial variation along the inner bay, but the proposed ∆R value is lower than those previously reported for nearby areas along the Pacific Coast. We also note potential variability in regional ∆R of approximately 200 14C years for the late Holocene, and comparison with an older paired bone and shell sample points toward more significant temporal variation earlier in tim