Life on the River: The Archaeology of an Ancient Native American Culture (review)

Life on the River summarizes the findings of an excavation project conducted by Far Western Anthropological Research, Inc., at Kum Bay Xerel (Shady Oak Village, CA-SHA-1043) along the banks of the Upper Sacramento River in northern California. The site that the archaeologists and a group of Wintu and professional volunteers unearthed was a precontact and early contact period Wintu village occupied during the early 1800s. Because the site is located on private land, the owner was required to finance excavations, consultations, and burial removal before the land could be developed for residential housing. As required by the Society for California Archaeology and the Shata County Department of Resource Management, Hildebrandt and Dercangelo, in consultation with Wintu elders and cultural monitors, produced a highly readable, concise book about the site, the history of the Wintu and their ancestors, and their Indigenous occupation of this land over ten thousand years.

Life on the River is a good example of what proper consultation with Native communities yields in the expansion of knowledge about the culture, health, and history of particular peoples. In this case, the Wintu, the archaeological community, students, and the general public all gain from these efforts because Hildebrandt and Dercangelo provide new information that is relevant, contextualized, and made accessible in an easy-to-read book. The book is a culture history, not a work that espouses a theory or seeks to prove a hypothetical construct. It begins with an introduction that sets the stage by describing the project’s history, the consultation process, and important findings. Following this is a chapter entitled “The Distant Past,” which describes the early occupations of the Upper Sacramento Valley (labeled in periods based on artifactual remains), subsistence adaptations to climatic changes, and the arrival of the Wintu based on a historical linguistic analysis conducted in conjunction with Wintu speakers. While the chapter has an excellent concise introduction to dating methods and explains how archaeologists designate time and cultural periods, missing is a rendition of appropriate Wintu stories of their origins and arrival in the area around 1500 BP.

The next chapter describes parts of traditional Wintu culture as related in the ethnographic literature, findings from other sites in the region, and interviews with Wintu elders. By “traditional,” the authors mean Wintu culture (which they call lifeways) just prior to European contact. Emphasis is given to food procurement and processing through wild seed gathering, hunting, and fishing; social organization (short paragraphs devoted to chiefs, shamans, marriage, gambling); warfare; and architecture. These are the standard sociocultural categories of life that leave evidence in the archaeological record. Again, Wintu stories are missing and would have enhanced and fleshed out the narrative.

Following these contextualizing chapters is a description of the excavations at Kun Bay Xerel. This is a concise, well-written, standard site description, including the location of the site, excavation methods and summaries of the different techniques used to acquire information, site stratigraphy, and chronology. The authors focus on architecture, house structure, artifacts, and food remains. Like the rest of the book, this chapter is well illustrated with photographs of the Wintu excavating and monitoring the site, charts, profiles, and drawings of artifacts. Particularly interesting are the house and earth lodge features and how the Wintu identified their use, the source of obsidian and beads, which tells of trade patterns, and the botanical remains, which demonstrate how the Wintu and their ancestors used multiple parts of their lands so as not to denigrate any one source.

The most interesting information in the book is contained in the next chapter, “The End of an Era: First Contacts with Europeans.” It is also the saddest. A burial ground was unexpectedly discovered in the middle of the excavation, an area that would be highly impacted by the housing development. Although it is always preferable to leave human remains untouched, the Wintu decided to learn from their...