Protohistoric Village Organization and Territorial Maintenance: the Archaeology of Síi Túupentak (ALA-565/H) in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

The Center for Archaeological Research at UC Davis (CARD) has published Volume 20 in their series focused on California and Great Basin ethnography, environment, and prehistory. This latest edition is yet another important contribution to ancestral California Native American culture. The volume’s many contributors address a broad range of topics and have prepared a report that is arguably one of the most thorough analyses of a Late Period village site in the archaeological literature of the San Francisco Bay region to date. The authors identify the site as within the territory of the CausenOhlone polity, whose members were inducted into Mission San José shortly after its founding in 1797. Dubbed Síi Tuúpentak by the project’s Muwekma Tribal partners (which in the Chochenyo East Bay dialect translates to “Place of the Water Roundhouse”), the village developed in an area that was intermediary between bay shore populations and those residing further inland. Strategically situated within an oak woodland savannah setting behind the East Bay hills in Sunol along Alameda Creek, the residents were ideally placed to benefit from the flow of resources between neighboring and more distant polities. The report goes deep into the weeds describing the site within the framework of its environmental setting, and paleoethnobotanical studies derived from feature and burial contexts provide a wonderfully detailed spectrum of vegetal resources important to the subsistence and economy of the village’s members. Equally impressive are the discussions of the important representations of aquatic and terrestrial dietary fauna derived from careful analysis of selected samples. Far Western Anthropological Research Group (FWARG) describes how the site underwent a series of archaeological investigations in response to developmental impacts, resulting in the exhumation of 76 individual burials along