Trail of Shells May Lead to Indians’ Past

They were the puka shells of California’s prehistoric coastal Indians, tiny beads made by the thousands from the rather plain hull of a common sea snail.

Before being strung--probably around everything from necklines to baskets--the pieces of Olivella biplicata were perforated in one of two ways: either by a simple drill or a small punch.

All of them, that is, except for a handful that exhibit a minuscule manufacturing quirk and are becoming key pieces of a puzzle scientists believe could illuminate the murky evolution of civilization and languages among Southern California’s prehistoric coastal Indians.

The 225 known Olivella Grooved Rectangle beads have been unearthed in clusters from the southern Channel Islands to Ventura Boulevard in Encino to south-central Oregon--suggesting that tribal trading was more extensive and earlier than many scientists previously suspected.

With their extensive distribution, the 5,000-year-old decorative beads underscore the relatively recent understanding that local tribes were among the more complex in North America, rather than simple “digger Indians,” as the hunter-gatherers were derisively labeled just a few decades ago.

The small beads “are potentially going to revolutionize what we know about the [prehistoric] Southern California area,” said University of Oregon professor Jon Erlandson, momentarily abandoning the cautious language of those who study prehistory. An expert on California coastal archeology, Erlandson said the beads, along with other recent evidence, are “suggesting to me that these people were ideologically, technologically and culturally complex, 5,000 years ago.”

The tiny beads and other emerging evidence also suggest that neither the region nor its earliest humans were as isolated as long believed.

“What is starting to emerge is that California was not an island,” said Mark Raab, director of the Center for Public Archeology at Cal State Northridge.

The beads may have political implications as well, say scientists such as anthropologist John Johnson of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, as local Native Americans attempt to establish their histories, achieve official tribal recognition from the federal government and win the respect they say they have never enjoyed.

The handful of researchers investigating the beads also think they might shed light on the different languages spoken by Southern California’s two main tribes, the Tongva and the Chumash. When Europeans first arrived, the Tongva primarily inhabited what are now Orange and Los Angeles counties, with the Chumash living to the north and south along the coast.

The beads made their way from the southern Channel Islands to Orange County, Encino, western Nevada and Ft. Rock Valley, Ore.--all places where the inhabitants spoke languages from the Uto-Aztecan family, as did the Tongva. But, with the exception of a single bead found near Santa Barbara, there is no evidence of them in the territory of the Chumash, whose linguistic family is disputed and whose final speaker died in the 1960s.

If the beads were indeed being traded along an Uto-Aztecan frontier, that would also dispute a theory that the Chumash were the sole occupants of the Southern California coast until just 1,000 or 2,000 years ago when, it was believed, the Uto-Aztecan speakers first made their way from the Great Basin to the Los Angeles Basin.

So Southern California’s ancient residents may not have been as parochial as some had thought, if the beads’ distribution is being interpreted accurately.

“If materials can move over long distances, then so can icons, beliefs, religions, concepts--which would make for a much more dynamic social order,” said Raab, the coauthor of a 1993 paper that first triggered interest in the beads.

“California archeology and anthropology has tended to think of itself only in terms of itself.”

The modern saga of the Olivella Grooved Rectangle began in 1929, when an archeologist named William C. Orchard unearthed 16 of the beads at a place called Lovelock Cave in northwestern Nevada. Others were found in that area of the Great Basin in ensuing years, in caves and rock shelters along the shores of ancient marshes.

But the “detective story,” as Raab puts it, that has begun to play out around the tiny beads did not commence until 1991.

That was the year Raab and his assistant, William Howard, excavated a site on Catalina Island called Little Harbor and returned to Cal State Northridge’s Center for Public Archeology with a host of artifacts to clean, sort and study.

“We got back to the lab and washed them, and I’m going through all the beads and found one I’d never seen before,” said Howard, who took up archeology after 27 years in the Navy. “Neither had Mark.”

Unlike the majority of Olivella beads, these had been perforated by someone who scratched or sawed at the curved shell until a hole appeared in its center, rather than punching or drilling an opening.

Said Raab: “Right then and there, our curiosity got going.”

The next year, they found a similar bead on the floor of a 5,000-year-old shelter on nearby San Clemente Island.

Combing scientific journals and dusty texts, Raab and Howard soon learned that the same type of beads had been found more than half a century earlier at several sites in northwestern Nevada and northeastern California. But that was before the days of radiocarbon dating, and so the age of those beads was harder to establish. The early archeologists had noted their odd construction but otherwise made little of the objects, the largest of which are hardly the size of a small fingernail.

Investigating further, Raab and Howard learned that still other specimens had been unearthed at San Nicolas Island, one of the southern Channel Islands, where some had been glued to a piece of cardboard and hung on a wall at a local Navy station.

Still more beads turned up in Orange County and in Encino. In the Encino find, an archeologist hired in the mid-1980s to monitor a controversial construction site sued the developer over payment, stalling research into the mother lode of bones, pottery, and other artifacts culled from the urban site. The case was later settled, but little has been learned about what was found--except that Olivella Grooved Rectangle beads were among the artifacts.

In 1993, after carbon-dating many of the beads to around 3,000 B.C., Howard and Raab published a paper suggesting the existence of an ancient “socioeconomic interaction sphere” between the three Southern Channel Islands and adjacent coast, as well as another possible sphere in northwestern Nevada and northeastern California.

The next year, Rene Vellanoweth, now a doctoral student in the University of Oregon’s Department of Anthropology, uncovered 12 more beads on San Nicolas Island.

Then, as word spread in academic circles about the strange little beads in California, Erlandson and another researcher discovered two beads at a place called DJ Ranch, near the tiny town of La Pine, Ore. Overnight, the known travel of the beads, which almost certainly originated on the islands, had been extended to about 800 miles.

It had long been known that “there was some trade between California and the Great Basin, but it was perceived as more random,” Raab said.

To the researchers, though, the locations of the bead discoveries suggested a more organized route.

First, the clusters seemed to roughly follow a line along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, and the eastern side of the Cascades in Oregon.

Then, when the discovery sites were plotted on a map that shows the spread of Uto-Aztecan languages, every single discovery but the lone Santa Barbara bead fell into Uto-Aztecan territory.

For years, most linguists have believed that the early Chumash were the sole inhabitants of coastal Southern California until 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. At that point, linguists have believed, Uto-Aztecan speakers arrived from the Great Basin, dividing the Chumash population.

But if the Uto-Aztecans were making and trading the shells with tribes speaking similar languages as long as 5,000 years ago, the old linguistic timeline would have to be adjusted by 3,000 years or more.

Many linguists and others, however, point out that beads, like other artifacts, are and were traded across linguistic boundaries. And they aren’t ready to discount decades of other research.

“It really goes against our knowledge,” UC Berkeley linguistics professor Leanne Hinton said, defending the mainstream Uto-Aztecan hypothesis. “It’s hard for linguists to be certain about anything, because it’s all based on how similar languages are to each other. . . . I’m not ready to throw the timeline out the window.”

Neither are the archeologists.

“You can’t hang your hat on a bead distribution,” said Vellanoweth, which is why, in his doctoral work, he has begun to search for other artifacts that show up in the same sites as the beads and reinforce the notion that the Tongva were there.

And find them he has: Among the other items turning up are bone tubes used as beads, stones carved like cogwheels and fired-clay objects.

At a Newport Beach site, several giant blade-like artifacts were recovered, in addition to one bead. Through chemical analysis, scientists traced one of the obsidian blades to the area of northwestern Nevada where many of the beads have been found, said Mike Macko, the archeologist whose company excavated the sites. The blade’s age matches that of the beads as well.

Similar artifacts have been discovered in southwest Idaho, Macko said, another place where the early tribes were believed to speak Uto-Aztecan languages.

“There’s so much information lacking, you have to be very careful” about making grand conclusions, Macko said. “But . . . we do suggest there is a connection.”

So does Judith Porcasi, a UCLA zoo-archeologist who recently discovered a collection of small, fired-clay totems--also about 5,000 years old--from the same Catalina site where Howard and Raab found their first beads. The objects, which demonstrate that local tribes had learned about ceramics several thousand years before many scientists believed they had, have also been turning up in other provocative locales.

“Where the beads are found, these clay things are found,” Porcasi said. “And they’re very, very close in many circumstances. It’s another piece of evidence for this possible interaction sphere.”