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An Ethnogeography of Salinan and Northern Chumash Communities – 1769 to 1810 By: Randall Milliken and John R. Johnson March 2005 FAR WESTERN ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH GROUP, INC. 2727 Del Rio Place, Suite A, Davis, California, 95616 http://www.farwestern.com 530-756-3941 Prepared for Caltrans Contract No. 06A0148 & 06A0391 For individuals with sensory disabilities this document is available in alternate formats. Please call or write to: Gale Chew-Yep 2015 E. Shields, Suite 100 Fresno, CA 93726 (559) 243-3464 Voice CA Relay Service TTY number 1-800-735-2929 An Ethnogeography of Salinan and Northern Chumash Communities – 1769 to 1810 By: Randall Milliken Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc. and John R. Johnson Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Submitted by: Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc. 2727 Del Rio Place, Davis, California, 95616 Submitted to: Valerie Levulett Environmental Branch California Department of Transportation, District 5 50 Higuera Street, San Luis Obispo, California 93401 Contract No. 06A0148 & 06A0391 SLO-46, P.M. 37.8/56.5 March 2005 ABSTRACT This report presents a new understanding of the Salinan and Northern Chumash communities as they might have existed at Spanish contact, between 1769 and 1810. It relies mainly upon evidence in the registers of baptism, confirmation, marriage, and burial for missions San Antonio, San Luis Obispo, and San Miguel. Although the registers contain the names of 205 rancherías (villages and multi-village communities), they contain few direct clues about the placement of those rancherías on the landscape. To aid locational identification, we reviewed all of the J.P. Harrington notes on the Salinan and Chumash. From those and from other scholarly sources, we found evidence for the locations of only 16 of the 205 contact-period rancherías. To establish relative locations for the 205 rancherías, we used proximity information garnered from a study of kinship ties between rancherías, as documented in the mission registers. Because clues about inter- ranchería kinship ties were scattered among various mission register entries, the data had to be reorganized to reconstruct a regional ethnogeography. Computer databases were built and used to sort and cross-reference life history information for over 4,000 people baptized at Mission San Antonio, over 2,400 people baptized at Mission San Antonio, and over 3,000 people baptized at Mission San Luis Obispo. We then developed a model of population distribution expectations to examine and modify our assumptions regarding the density of village groups across the study area. By adjusting groups to the east, west, north, and south, we arrived at a map of the social landscape that made sense in terms of general environmental parameters. The model was exhaustively applied to the coastal regions from Lopez Point south to San Luis Obispo Bay. Due to time constraints, ranchería placements in the inland areas were less rigorously developed and await future projects in that area. The population model improved our understanding of the relative locations of the rancherías, but not their specific placement on the landscape. Language boundaries between contact-period Salinans and Northern Chumash were studied as an issue separate from that of specific community locations. Two widely accepted alternative boundaries are in the public record. A coastal dialect or language called Playano was believed by A.L. Kroeber to have been Salinan and by Robert Gibson to have been Chumash. Milliken believes that the preponderance of evidence suggests that Playano was related to Salinan, but it is possible that it was a separate, now extinct, relict language or was indeed a Chumash language. Johnson considers that we do not yet have enough data to determine which of the three alternatives is most likely. Linguistic analysis of Playano personal names by both Salinan and Chumash language scholars may be a future avenue for determining Playano linguistic affiliation. In addition to linguistic studies, future research should include an integrated analysis of all tribal populations from the San Francisco Bay to the Santa Barbara Channel. Such a study should be based upon fully developed family kinship charts and should include quantitative studies of inter-group marriage patterns, as done by Johnson (1988) for the Chumash. Finally, population model inferences must eventually be ground-checked through systematic archaeological survey and site testing to identify the true distribution of Late Period sites across the landscape. i ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We wish to thank many people, representing many institutions, for the roles that they played in the initiation and completion of this study of Mission Period Salinan and Northern Chumash community locations. We thank the responsible representatives of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), District 5, for their support. We are particularly grateful to Caltrans archaeologist Valerie Levulett for recognizing the importance of ethnohistoric and ethnogeographic studies as a contextual basis for cultural resource management. Val not only supported the research but contributed editorial ideas that greatly strengthened our final presentation. We also thank Caltrans staff members Terry Joslin and Paula Juelke Carr for their aid in refining our document. The present study is merely the next level in a series of kinship-network-based ethnohistoric studies carried out for Coast Range areas in California. For their earlier work and for their support of our work, we thank Chester King and Bob Gibson. Chester shared all of his kinship charts for Chumash areas with us. Bob contributed his time as a reviewer of this paper. Three other reviewers, Tom Blackburn, Michael Glassow, and Chris Lorenc, are also thanked for their substantive comments on early drafts and for contributing their time to this effort. Catherine Klar and Katherine Turner of the University of California at Berkeley provided ideas and information regarding personal names and linguistics. Rose-Marie Beebe of Santa Clara University edited the Spanish words in our manuscript for appropriate accenting, for which we give our gratitude. The skillful work of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group staff was critical to completion of the report. Tammara Norton is thanked for her map work and for her patience in dealing with us as we continually asked for adjustments. Larry Chiea, with initial help from Reinhard Pribish, lived through production of the kinship chart figures in Appendix E from nearly illegible pencil drafts provided by Randall Milliken. Jennifer Hatch set up the data base report forms in appendices B, C, and D, checked the bibliography, prepared many of the tables, and entered a complex series of edits. Heather Thompson formatted all versions of the document and corrected errors missed by others. We heartily thank them all. We also want to thank several people who spent considerable time and effort reading this final draft and challenging our ideas in the spirit of concern for truth and accuracy. They include ethnographers Dorothy Theodoratus and Nancy Evans, linguist Katherine Turner, and Greg Castro, Jose Freeman, and Robert Duckworth of the Salinan Nation Cultural Preservation Association. Finally, we thank Far Western Principal Pat Mikkelsen. Pat spent many hours engaged in substantive editing of our text. Whatever disciplined presentation is found in these pages results from her efforts. To Pat, and to Val Levulett, thanks for bearing with us over four years to ensure this study’s completion. RM and JRJ iii iv FORWARD: RESPONSE TO COMMENTS The following document has been reviewed by many individuals, including Caltrans personnel, Native Americans ethnographers, professors, linguists, and archaeologists. The authors would like to thank all reviewers for taking the time to read the report and for preparing comments. The following discussions focus on several issues that we felt needed clarification in response to comments received. THE POPULATION DISTRIBUTION MODEL It was stated by one reviewer that the population distribution model “is a great improvement over earlier, less-focused studies of this type,” while another noted that this “computerized study” can be applied to herding animals but not humans, it disregards “culture,” and “adjusts data” to fit the model. While the population distribution model could perhaps have been better explained, we believe that the iterative technique that we used, mapping otherwise unlocatable communities on to an ecologically variable landscape, resulted in a generally accurate