Even more: Can you find the shellmounds?

 Fascinating... 

Shellmound in Emeryville, CA, party torn apart. From Publications in American Archaeology and
Ethnography Journal, V 23 (1926)

Last week's Challenge was great fun, and as I mentioned, I spent a lot of time on this.  The Challenge definitely captured my Joy of Search!    

The original motivation for the Challenge came from walking past this bronze plaque that's in my neighborhood.  

But I have to take a this week off from SRS as I'm spending the next few days in Atlanta doing a annual site review for an NSF AI and healthcare project (AI-CARING).  Each year, NSF invites a small panel of folks in the field to review the work done over the past year and suggest, if needed, any changes to the plan.  So I'm kinda busy this week. 

However... as I mentioned, I found a LOT of material that I couldn't quite compress into last week's post.  If you looked through the comments, you'll see that lots of Regular Readers also found fascinating materials as well.  

One of the motivations for the Challenge was walking past this plaque at the corner of Middlefield Road and Webster Street, very near Marion Avenue in Palo Alto. 

 I looked high and low for an aerial photo of this area (or of the Castro and/or Ponce Shellmounds) taken before 1948.  I know that in 1948 the Castro shellmound was in the process of being deconstructed and sold as fertilizer.  You saw the best pix I could find in last week's story.  I just was not able to find great aerial photos from the before times.  Unfortunately.  

Interestingly, if you look up this plaque, you'll quickly find an essay by Benjamin Wright about this location, its geology, and the mounds that were here and how they were made.   

As he wrote: 

"The Muwekma/Ohlone would collect shellfish on a daily basis during the winter months, as it was their main staple at that time of the year. According to [Margolin], they typically returned to their villages with a day’s catch that was usually abundant. By the year’s end “they had collected literally tons of mussels, clams, oysters, olivellas, crabs, gooseneck barnacles, abalones, and other shellfish. As centuries passed the discarded shells piled up at village sites to form mounds. Some of these mounds were as much as thirty feet deep, some a quarter of a mile across . . . ”  These shellmound sites, also referred to as middens, or shell middens, by archaeologists, were reinforced with a mixture of soil and refuse [Chartkoff and Chartkoff]. 

Searching in Newspapers.com with location set to Palo Alto and searching before 1960, you can find articles that discuss the mounds, their locations, and what happened to them.  Here are a couple of samples:  

The Peninsula Times Tribune, Nov. 27, 1906.— The interest of scientists has been aroused by the discoveries made at an old Indian mound at Castro station, three miles south of here. The mound is owned by J. P. Ponce of Mayfield, who has been using its soil for fertilizer. Many skeletons of wild animals and human beings were unearthed in addition to various Indian ornaments and a vast quantity of sea shells. Prof. Harold Heath and Prof. J. O. Snyder of Stanford have investigated the mound and propose to make further excavations and send a collection of the relics unearthed to the National museum at Washington. The mound is the largest, yet found in this valley, being two acres in extent.

Another news article describes it as 

"300 feet (100 meters) in diameter and 10 feet high...even at that time (1893) ..they were the sites of villages... and the mounds contained the discarded shells as well as the bodies of the departed...during the early days of Stanford, you really hadn't lived until you had gone down to Castro and dug yourself up a skeleton or two."  

The mound also contained... 

"...whistles made of birds' bones, flint arrow-heads, beads of abalone shells, and mortars and pestles are among the booty now resting in museums or in private homes."  (PTT, Nov 19, 1946) 

Of course, since the Native American made mounds near streams, and streams are just about everywhere in the Bay Area, it's no surprise that there were many mounds.  The Nelson map included some 425 sites, but the full Nelson report comments that "it is not to be supposed that 425 exhausts the evidences of aboriginal occupation..."  

In my searches I found yet another map of shellmounds made by local historian and part-time surveyor Jerome Hamilton in 1937.  This shows the shellmounds around the city of San Mateo, along San Mateo and Blackhawk creeks.  

P/C San Mateo Historical Association

This map is in the San Mateo County Historical Association archives.  I found a reference to it in my Google search for shellmound maps, and was amazed to learn that it wasn't online, but if you just could stop by and visit the archive, you could see the map in person.

I spent a while with the map.  If you measure the distance between the railroad and El Camino Real (the major street in the area--neither the street nor the railroad have probably moved much in the past 67 years), we find it's nearly 500 meters.  

If the shellmound shown in the map (number 12) is depicted accurately, it's roughly 166 meters wide, much larger than the Castro mound.  

It's not a huge surprise that there are so many shellmounds in the SF Bay Area--they seem to have be made where there were people and streams.  If there was a stream that flowed into the Bay, you could pretty much reliably find a mound next to it.  In the following map you can see another dozen or so sites that we not included in the Nelson 1909 map.  Here's just what I located by map-diving... note that there was a stream every mile or two.  

As a consequence, there are MANY mounds... including some that are still being discovered today as people dig up the soil to do new construction.  Example: The new construction at "Elco Yards" in Redwood City, 37.4800228683888, -122.22562046367638 , just north of Palo Alto by a few miles. In an article from 2013, artifacts and bones were discovered while digging causing a long pause while the site was excavated and the remains repatriated.  

After the Guide to Bay Area Creeks. Each red dot is a shellmound that I found via online research as described.  Original base map based on work Guide to San Francisco Bay Area Creeks

As several authors have noted, Native American groups pretty much made mounds everywhere they went.  In my immediate neighborhood between Adobe and Matadero Creeks, I found reports of 5 or 6 mounds.  All of them long gone--carted away for fertilizer or buried under omnipresent construction. Stanford University, just 15 minutes away by bicycle has at least 60 sites on campus.  Just to the left of the ninth tee on the campus course, on a rise overlooking the nearby road, is a curiously shaped rock with a circular depression on top. A plaque informs golfers that the outcropping is an Indian grinding stone, once used by the Muwekma-Ohlone people to crush acorns into flour.  It's a huge rock that was on a great site--near a stream and thousands of oak trees.  A great place to live and create a mound or two.  

Bottom line: This is all pretty much Native land everywhere, with home places, village, and mounds everywhere throughout the Bay Area.  With a bit of online search, you can discover truly remarkable things--in this case, traces of people who lived here long ago, and stories that I never knew.  

As always, Keep Searching! 

==============

Chartkoff, Joseph L., Kerry Kona Chartkoff. The Archaeology of California. Stanford U P, 1984. 

Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area. Heyday Books, 1978.