Diet and Identity Among the Ancestral Ohlone
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DIET AND IDENTITY AMONG THE ANCESTRAL OHLONE: INTEGRATING STABLE ISOTOPE ANALYSIS AND MORTUARY CONTEXT AT THE YUKISMA MOUND (CA-SCL-38) ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Chico ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Anthropology ____________ by Karen Smith Gardner Spring 2013 DIET AND IDENTITY AMONG THE ANCESTRAL OHLONE: INTEGRATING STABLE ISOTOPE ANALYSIS AND MORTUARY CONTEXT AT THE YUKISMA MOUND (CA-SCL-38) A Thesis by Karen Smith Gardner Spring 2013 APPROVED BY THE DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND VICE PROVOST FOR RESEARCH: _________________________________ Eun K. Park, Ph.D. APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE: ______________________________ _________________________________ Guy Q. King, Ph.D. Eric Bartelink, Ph.D., Chair Graduate Coordinator _________________________________ Antoinette M. Martinez, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The process of completing this degree and writing this thesis has been a homecoming for me, returning me to the ideas and complexities of anthropology and to the rolling hills and valleys of Central California, where I grew up. First and foremost, I would like to thank Rosemary Cambra and the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe for your interest and support of this project. I am humbled by your trust in giving me this access to your past. It has been my honor to glimpse the lives of your ancestors. My thesis committee has been tremendously supportive. To Dr. Eric Bartelink and Dr. Antoinette Martinez, thank you for your patience and encouragement. Between you, you have provided me with a wonderful breadth of knowledge. Eric, as a pioneer of stable isotope analysis in Central California you have introduced new potential to the interpretation of the prehistoric past here, and passed this enthusiasm along to your students. I’ll never forget the day when you gave me this project; it was a generous gesture and the best luck of my academic career. Nette, your ability to balance theory, archaeological interpretation, historical context, and ethnohistory to peel back layers of perspective about the lived experience of people in the past has inspired me to do the same. Thank you for being a voice of calm encouragement throughout this process. To both of you, your insights are clearly inscribed between the lines of these pages. Thanks are also due to my professors at California State University, Chico, who gave me the tools to approach anthropological questions from a four-field iii perspective. I have had the privilege of studying forensic anthropology with Dr. Turhon Murad, learning the art of teaching from Dr. Beth Shook, squinting over faunal remains with Dr. Frank Bayham, and learning about linguistics from Dr. Sarah Trechter. I studied medical anthropology with Dr. David Eaton, who brings such careful concern to each topic and every student. Dr. Bill Loker challenged me to question my theoretical footing, and I am the better for it. To Dr. P. Willey, I will never be able to thank you enough for our grand Peruvian adventure and the weeks of osteological survey in the Chachapoyan cave. To Drs. Georgia Fox, Stacy Schaefer, Brian Brazeal, Colleen Milligan, and Jesse Dizzard, thank you for the inspired conversations. It has been a wonderful experience to be a part of such a diverse and thoughtful department. The completion of this thesis research required assistance from many people and many laboratories. At CSU Chico, thanks are due to Melanie Beasley for training me in stable isotope methods in the Stable Isotope Preparation Laboratory and for spending long and odd hours in the lab with me getting this project done. Melanie also showed me the art of pressing pellets for FT-IR analysis in the CSU Chico chemistry laboratory. Thank you to Dr. Randy Miller for allowing us to use his lab’s materials and equipment for this research. I also appreciate the help of graduate students Amy MacKinnon and Stefanie Kline, who prepared additional samples from CA-SCL-38 to supplement my research. Shannon Clinkinbeard manages the CSU Chico Human Identification Laboratory, and I want to thank her for a million conversations while I was overtired, overstressed, and working in the lab. iv Stable isotope analysis of bone collagen was completed under the supervision of Dr. David Harris at the UC Davis Stable Isotope Facility in the Department of Plant Sciences. The bone apatite analysis was completed by Dr. David Winter and Dr. Howie Spero at the UC Davis Stable Isotope Laboratory in the Department of Geology. Analysis of sulfur isotopes was provided by Dr. Olaf Nehlich in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Much gratitude is due to these men and their assistants who provided the data for this analysis. Fourteen new radiocarbon dates were run at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I am grateful for the friendship and guidance of Paula Zermeño and the support of Tom Guilderson. I have had the benefit of advice from many experts in their fields. Thank you to Alan Leventhal at San Jose State University for access to the CA-SCL-38 collections, for all of the helpful and informative information about regional archaeology, and for your enthusiastic support throughout this process. Dwight Simons has given me wonderful advice about the early environment and available resources on the menu for the ancestral Ohlone. Ben Fuller provided access to unpublished comparative sulfur isotope data and answered questions about radiocarbon dating methods. Conversations with Mark Hylkema provided great insight about artifact significance and ritual practices. Bev Ortiz gave me a special tour of the mounds at Coyote Hills, so I could get a sense of what mounded space in prehistoric California would have been like. Forensic odontologist, Leon Pappanastos, met with me to review photographs of dentition from v CA-SCL-38 for refinement of age classifications. Kevin Dalton created the wonderful regional map, used in Chapter II. The excavation of the Yukisma Mound was completed in 1993 and 1994. As such, my access to the information from this site is framed through the eyes of earlier interpreters. Thanks are due to Ohlone Families Consulting Services, particularly Rosemary Cambra, Alan Leventhal, and Laura Jones, for documentation of the excavation and for granting me access to this information. Robert Jurmain and Susan Morley’s analyses of the osteological material provided the demographic basis and data for bioarchaeological interpretation. Viviana Bellifemine documented the mortuary context and provided me with advice, access to unpublished data, and encouragement along the way. Tammy Buonasera shared her insights about groundstone form and function. Cara Monroe helped me with sample selection at the beginning of this project and shared insights about the Yukisma Mound population from her DNA research. The study of diet and identity of the ancestral Ohlone was actually not the first thesis project I began at CSU Chico. Before embarking on this journey, I had planned to do a research project about diet, trade, and mobility patterns of individuals from the Tiwanaku polity, buried between 800 and 1000 AD in the Chen Chen Cementario in Moquegua, Peru. I traveled to Bolivia and Peru during the summer of 2008 and completed sample collection with all appropriate local permissions, but was unable to export the samples to complete the analysis. Nonetheless, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the help of Dr. Bruce Owen in connecting me with this project and the wonderful people at Museo Contesuyo in Moquegua, Peru, including Paty vi Palacios Filinich and Yamilex Tejada. I hope to one day finish what I started – perhaps completion of this master’s degree will help. I was tremendously lucky to have been part of an amazing cohort at CSU Chico, including Brenna Blanchard, Lance Blanchard, Carrie Brown, Melinda Button, Kristin Chelotti, Deanna Commons, Leanna Flaherty, Kate Kolpan, Nicole Ramirez, and Amanda van Woert. I have loved sharing this journey with you! Thank you for the laughs and the friendship. Thanks and acknowledgements are also due to Arran Bell, Lisa Bright, James Brill, Maija Glasier, Kristina Crawford, Stephanie Meyers, Maura Schapper, and Nikki Willits. Kristina and Lisa, thank you for being my home away from home and for the late night conversations about archaeology and bourbon and bones. Thank you to Lauren Hasten, my friend and mentor, for showing me the power of anthropology education, inspiring me to return to school, and giving me a job when I was done with classes. I also want to acknowledge Dr. Margaret Richards and Dr. Mike Ansell, my chemistry professors, and Kathleen Azevedo, my Physiology and Anatomy professor at Las Positas College in Livermore, California. Together they made me believe that I could succeed in science. My students over the last three years at Las Positas College have watched me balance teaching and research, and I appreciate their support and encouragement as well. In the summer of 2012, I began work with Karin Beck and Annamarie Guerrero of URS and Diane DiGuiseppe and Dave Grant of D&D Osteology. I would like to thank them for the opportunities they have given me, and also for being so flexible and supportive about time off to finish writing. My co-workers on the VMC project have vii listened to me ramble about Santa Clara archaeology and have provided a valued sounding board for many ideas. Much gratitude is due to my friends and family who have watched me slog through years of research, mounds of paper, and all the joys and stresses of graduate school. To my friends, thank you for being patient while I’ve been holed up working on my thesis. To my parents, Chuck and Ann Smith, you have always supported my dreams.