College Students Piecing Together a Tribe’s History

About every 15 minutes, a plume of dust rises into the vast Angeles Forest sky as student archeologists work to unravel the mysteries about the Indians who occupied the area hundreds of years ago.

Dirt dumped by the bucketful onto a metal sieve exposes pebbles, bits of charcoal and occasionally a tiny bead carved from a shell. Patiently and carefully, the debris is examined piece by piece.

“Everything we find is new information,” Pierce College anthropology student Joanne Gilby said. “You have to train your eye to see what’s different, what rocks have sharp edges, which ones have colors that don’t fit in. It looks like there’s nothing here, but there is. It’s like a big puzzle and these are the clues.”

Gilby is one of 13 Pierce students who travel once a week from the Woodland Hills campus to dig on federal property near Acton.

In March, the U.S. Forest Service signed an 18-month agreement with the Los Angeles Community College district giving the college permission to excavate sites believed to have once been home to the Indian tribe known as Tataviam, which roughly translates to “people of the southern slopes.”

No burial sites have been found, but students have uncovered many historical items, including a circle of rocks that outlined an Indian house, several rock-lined pits, beads, a shark’s tooth, burnt animal bones and arrow-heads.

“We’re getting a lot of data we weren’t even aware of. The potential is tremendous,” said Doug Milburn, an archeologist for the 693,667-acre Angeles National Forest.

The agreement is mutually beneficial to the government and the college. The financially strapped Forest Service gets free archeological help and the students get a firsthand opportunity to learn the art and science of excavation.

“Frankly, community college students often don’t get to do fieldwork,” said David S. Whitley, who was chief archeologist at the UCLA Institute of Archeology in the early 1980s and is now a private consultant. “Being able to do this is important. It’s good for their training.”

The excavation also may benefit members of the Tataviam tribe hoping to learn more about their ancestors whose territory ranged from the Santa Clara River valley area, near the communities of Piru and Newhall, eastward.

What little is known about this hunter-gatherer tribe -- which numbered 500 to 1,000 when they encountered Spanish explorer Father Francisco Garces in 1776 -- has been gleaned from larger tribes who lived nearby and from records kept at the San Fernando Mission. Once at the mission, Tataviam intermarried, commingling their distinct heritage with that of other tribes, including the Chumash and Kitanemuks.

It will be largely through archeology that scientists learn about the inhabitants of the region, said John Johnson, curator of anthropology at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, who is helping a group of Indians of Tataviam ancestry make their case to become a federally recognized tribe. “Because of a lack of direct observation and information, there has to be a lot of piecing together of the puzzle,” Johnson said.

While welcoming the chance to learn more about the past, one Tataviam tribal leader said he is ambivalent about the excavation, even though the tribe is notified about significant finds.

“I have mixed feelings. It’s our ancestry, our culture, but there are some areas that are not supposed to be touched,” such as tools used by medicine people or spiritual leaders, said Rudy Ortega Jr., director of the Fernandeno-Tataviam Tribe.

“When they determined those tools had served their purpose, they were blessed and buried in a certain way,” Ortega said. But overall, he said, he believes it’s best to have the artifacts discovered.

“You need to do archeology so people can put together pieces of the past,” he said. “Without it, you’ll never know. It’s good for the tribe to have [the items] preserved and documented.”

A chance meeting in December 1999 led to the eventual agreement between the Forest Service and the college district. While on a private tour of a rock art site in the Santa Susana Mountains, Noble Eisenlauer, assistant instructor of anthropology at Pierce, struck up a conversation with a Forest Service official, telling him how the college wanted to revive its archeological field class but needed a place to dig.

Eisenlauer said Michael Mcntyre, forest archeologist for the Angeles National Forest, told him that the Forest Service needed volunteers to document the many recorded historic and prehistoric sites in the area. By January 2001 arrangements were completed and the students began to dig under Eisenlauer’s supervision.

Affectionately known as “Dr. E,” Eisenlauer shows students hot to use trowels and brushes to search for history, 10 centimeters at a time.

“When the course starts, they are showing me everything they find,” Eisenlauer said. “By the end, they aren’t showing me that much. They are seeing things they didn’t used to see.”

Even Eisenlauer occasionally spots artifacts previously overlooked, like a man-made groove in a rock next to a trail he has walked a hundred times.

“Things are subtle. You have to walk around and become sensitized to it; then it jumps out at you,” he said.

Based on the discovery of burnt juniper berries, which are not available year-round, Eisenlauer said he believes the area could have been a seasonal campground used in the spring and that a larger village may be close by. While the site has been disturbed over the years--Eisenlauer said they have found shotgun shells and candy wrappers, among other debris--an analysis of what they have excavated, including beads made of shell, glass and stone, indicates they were from the Mission Period (1771 to 1821).

If funding can be found, he said he hopes that organic material discovered in the dig--plant roots, animal bones and pieces of charcoal--can be radiocarbon-dated to figure out when people lived in the area, known by some researchers as the “Bermuda Triangle of California,: because of its lack of documentation.

At a rate of about 1,000 working hours per year, Eisenlauer believes he and the students will be in the area for a long time searching for lost villages.

“Working at this pace, we have decades of work out there,” he said. “Every few weeks we find something new.”