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There is a frequent assumption among the general public that contact with Europeans and their material technologies prompted all Native Americans to abandon stone tool technology rather quickly. Archaeologists have done a poor job of changing that misperception, but it would be dif¤cult to dispel a myth that many archaeologists hold as part of their own academic worldview. One does not have to look far to see archaeologists writing about how impressed or awed Native-American people must have been at European technological prowess. The underlying premise is that technological choices are related only to functional ef¤ciency, that our notions of functionality were shared by social actors in the past and that rocks must give way to metal. This paper will reveal how problematic such a premise is when it is assumed rather than tested empirically. Despite the often implicit assumption among many archaeologists that lithic tools were replaced by supposedly superior colonial tools or remained behind as mere vestiges of an indigenous lifeway, several archaeologists have started to overturn these assumptions with more careful studies. The archaeological recovery and analysis of lithic artifacts in Contact-period and historical assemblages have vastly improved the study of colonialism and culture contact in the Americas (Bamforth 1993; Cobb and Ruggiero, chapter 2; Fox 1979; Hester 1977, 1989:219–223; Hudson 1993; Johnson 1997, chapter 4; Nassaney and Volmar, chapter 6; Odell, chapter 3; Whittaker and Fratt 1984). If nothing else, they have given due attention to the indigenous side of colonial interactions and have helped extract Native Americans and others from an assumed role of passivity. Even in cases where chipped-stone tools rapidly disappear, archaeological studies have revealed the material and social complexity of these colonial encounters and the diversity of lithic practices that may or may not continue into postContact periods. This volume offers many such cases. Most archaeologists have explored the functional side of lithic technology in Contact-period or colonial 9 Using a Rock in a Hard Place Native-American Lithic Practices in Colonial California Stephen Silliman sites, arguing that stone tool use can be seen as an economic response to scarce supplies of metal (Hester 1989:235; Whittaker and Fratt 1984:16–17). Others have interpreted lithic tools as part of material symbolism (Hudson 1993:266; Nassaney and Volmar, chapter 6) or daily politics and identity (Silliman 2001), propelling discussions of lithic practices into explicitly social realms. Some archaeologists have certainly highlighted a shift in perspective to the social context of stone tool use (Gero 1991, Rosen 1996), but few archaeologists working on the historical periods of North America have taken suf¤cient notice. In this chapter, I contribute to the growing archaeological literature that contextualizes lithic practices within social relations. My focus is a site in nineteenthcentury Northern California associated with the Rancho Petaluma, a large land grant owned by a prominent Mexican-Californian military leader. The archaeological site contains a living area for Native-American people who worked on this Mexican rancho in the 1830s and 1840s. The case offers a unique glimpse of lithic practices in a distinctly colonial setting rather than in a separate “Contact-period” village or community. This means that the site records intense , sustained, daily interactions between Native-American and colonial individuals that hinged predominantly on relations of labor. This also means that many of the indigenous people involved in these contexts endured dif¤cult and oppressive situations. For this reason, lithic technology and stone tools—“using rocks”—represent a salient material and social practice for Native-American people embroiled in a dif¤cult colonial world (see also Cassell, chapter 10). Lithic technology was a practice of political consequence in everyday life (Silliman 2001). My emphasis here is on chipped-stone technology and raw material and the ways that these can be investigated in the context of technology, sourcing studies, and the availability of colonial mass-produced goods. This combination allows a clearer view of how lithic practices were used in colonial settings and how such a perspective might bene¤t other Contact-period studies. WESTERN NORTH AMERICA, STONE TOOLS, AND SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY Hunter-gatherer societies of Western North America provide unique opportunities for sorting out issues in Contact-period and post-Contact lithic technology. California is a particularly rich area for addressing this topic because of the diversity of lithic materials in site assemblages and the prevalence of frequently datable and sourceable obsidian raw material across much of the region. Numerous Contact-period sites with lithic artifacts...

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