Ceramic Production in Early Hispanic California: Craft, Economy, and Trade on the Frontier of New Spain

Preface

Preface The Beginning of a Beautiful (Project) Friendship It was the middle of June 1998 and it was hot! In an office on the third floor of an un-air-conditioned, stairs-only 1911 building, stacks of ungraded papers and final exams were teetering on the edge of a desk that was cluttered with the detritus of faculty meetings and family life and seemingly countless uncompleted research projects. The place was California at a small private undergraduate university that is at once cosmopolitan as it is located in Silicon Valley and provincial because it lacks graduate students. Without the latter to support and drive a project forward, research becomes a secondary concern to be picked at around other commitments using undergraduate students and the platform provided by the classroom. Known as the “teacher-scholar” model in academia, it can be a wonderful experience for interested students and a huge time commitment on the part of the professor with the very real possibility that the results will be unusable. That said, this is called life, and we have to get used to it. Nonetheless, one project concerning ceramic production , supply, and exchange in Spanish California had begun to germinate . While senior colleagues such as Julia Costello and Ron May had laid the groundwork for these studies in the 1980s through their analyses of ceramics recovered in missions, presidios, and ranchos, there were still many questions to be asked, including a basic one, “Where were the ceramics made?” Some were imported from Mexico and beyond, but what of the more mundane plain and lead-glazed ceramics: where did they xxiv Preface originate? Finding the answer to these questions would take finding the support of a research institution with the know-how and tools that was also interested in being part of this project. In California the historical archaeology of Spanish and Mexican California was, until the recent addition of Barb Voss (a contributor to this volume) at Stanford, conducted by federal and state agencies (Glenn Farris , Larry Felton and Eloise Barter—contributors to this volume), cultural resource management firms (Julia Costello and Jack Williams—both contributors to this volume), and a small number of undergraduate institutions , including Cabrillo College (Rob Edwards), California Polytechnic State University (Robert Hoover—a contributor to this volume); CSUMonterey Bay (Ruben Mendoza), and Santa Clara University. Although the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara have produced many PhDs whose research has focused on this era, none of the faculty have such an ongoing focus. As a result, none of those who were conducting the research had either the budget or the time to obtain grant money to explore the larger questions about ceramic production and exchange. Let’s face it, just how “sexy” is it to study glorified fragments of undecorated low-fired earthenware pots that are only some 200 years old and were part of the material culture of a literate society? It would take a miracle to put together all the pieces for this study. This is where the nascent project sat that hot June day. And then, the telephone rang with a call from Ron Bishop at the Smithsonian to Russ Skowronek asking if there were any “interesting” projects in which instrumental neutron activation analysis might be used. The rest, we can say, is history, or perhaps more accurately, history rewritten. In 1999 the project team conducted a pilot study involving ceramics and architectural earthenware from the Santa Clara mission. The chemical composition of 105 samples was determined using instrumental neutron activation analysis. It was found that some of the potsherds are chemically identical to bricks and tiles found at the site. This, of course, suggested that the same source of clay was used for both and that they were both made at Santa Clara. Interestingly, however, chemical differences among some of the pottery suggested the possible influence of technological differences or, of course, the potential presence of traded specimens. The encouraging findings from these analyses gave reason to expand the study to other locations throughout California. If there is a ubiquitous artifact on the Spanish/Mexican sites of Alta California, it would be fragments of architectural earthenwares—bricks Preface xxv and tiles, or ladrillos and tejas. Tons of these have been excavated and curated or sometimes thrown away or sold because they were seen as undiagnostic by archaeologists and curators. Then, beginning in 1999, this project demonstrated that these artifacts...