The History and Heritage of Coastal Landscapes in Colonial San Francisco Bay

The History and Heritage of Coastal Landscapes in Colonial San Francisco Bay

Tsim Schneider (Anthropology, UCSB)
Thursday, November 21 / 5:00 PM
 2001a HSSB

Spanish missions in the San Francisco Bay area of California represent the endpoint of 200 years of Catholic missionization on the North American continent and the far northern frontier of colonial New Spain in 1776. The missions were also established within indigenous landscapes comprised of Native communities with well-established cultures and deep histories that informed the ways they negotiated, accepted, and refused introduced practices and policies. This talk presents an archaeological and historical study of Spanish missions and mounded landscapes with an eye toward the creative ways Indians maintained connections to these landscapes and other places of refuge in the hinterlands around the missions. Largely overlooked as places of historical importance, he examines shellmounds as venues to which Indians returned through approved or illicit departures from the missions to keep tabs on tradition and make do with the challenges of the times.

Tsim D. Schneider is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSB and holds a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley. His forthcoming edited volume, Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory (University of Arizona Press), co-authored with Lee M. Panich (Santa Clara University), is due out next year.

Sponsored by  the IHC’s Archaeology RFG and the  Dept. of Anthropology.
Website: https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/archaeology/