Presidio Provides a Peek Back in Time

Judging from the trash, early Spanish officers at the Presidio overlooking Mission Valley preferred Chinese pottery with blue willow designs. But, when Mexico took over in the 1820s, brightly painted Mexican dishes were the pottery of choice.

The garbage left behind by 18th-Century Spanish officers stationed at the Presidio, the site of the first Spanish settlement in California, is giving archeologists a continuing look at preferences of the Europeans who lived at what was both a fort and an administrative center when it was founded in 1769 by Spaniards led by Father Junipero Serra.

“The Presidio was the frontier fort of the Spanish colonial exercise,” Brad Bartel, professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, told an audience during a recent slide presentation at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park.

What distinguishes the San Diego fort in Presidio Park from ones established at Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco, is that it is the only one that was extensively preserved and available for excavation. The one in San Francisco was destroyed by the Army in the 1850s, and the other two are beneath modern structures, Bartel said.

Since fall, 1987, about 50,000 artifacts have been excavated from the northern side of the fort by Bartel and SDSU students. Most of the artifacts came from what was a trash dump next to the four rooms that have thus far been excavated. That trash, Bartel said, has revealed pieces of Chinese pottery with blue willow motifs from the 1770s and British imitations of the Chinese pottery from the 1800s.

Bartel said they have found pieces of bowls, plates and teacups in different floral patterns made by the British.

“The Spanish preferred British or Chinese pottery,” Bartel said. “They were users of other societies’ pottery.

“They took a little slice of life from Europe with them,” he said. “Frontier duty for a soldier is not easy. Therefore, to be able to pick some aesthetic preferences made life a little bit easier.”

When control of the fort transferred from Spain to Mexico in the 1820s, the trash changed. Among the shards were fragments of brightly painted Mexican pottery, metal buttons, nails, beads, abalone and clamshells, and the bones of thousands of butchered animals.

Other parts of the fort have already been excavated: a chapel on the southern side by a San Diego State crew, from 1965-1976, and the fort’s western wing by a Mesa College crew, from 1976-1983.

The Serra Museum, dedicated in 1929 on a hill above the Presidio, has artifacts from those excavations on display. The San Diego Mission was once situated at the Presidio but was moved in 1774 to its present location in Mission Valley, about 6 miles east.

The fort was abandoned in the 1830s when the inhabitants moved down the hill into what is now Old Town.

The fort was buried in the 1930s, when George White Marston acquired the land and gave it to the city to be used as a public park.

“He understood the significance of the site and wanted to preserve it,” Bartel said.