The California Indian Before European Contact

Abstract

The stereotype image of California Indians as crude, simple and docile people who openly embraced European settlement and were quickly covered with a blanket of civilization reflects little understanding of both the sophisticated institutional and ecological base that underlined aboriginal occupancy. This study analyzes aboriginal occupancy of California in a series of maps depicting language territories, population, settlement, subsistence, trade and institutional patterns. The decline of the California Indian after European contact is also mapped and discussed. The relationship between population density and distribution, settlement, territorial organization and subsistence was very closely tied to a common environmental thread, but it was the clever use of social institutions that insured the persistence of the California Indian