Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Marco Meniketti
The chapters in this volume investigate the multifaceted character of maritime landscapes and maritime-oriented communities in California’s equally diverse cultural landscape, viewed through an archaeological lens. The contributing authors were invited to address the concept of maritime cultural landscape from diverse perspectives with as much emphasis on social behavior and community as material culture in order to reveal intersections and commonalities. The term landscape may seem oxymoronic when discussing maritime communities or endeavors. Yet, the term seascape is more limiting and inclines one to think only of what happens offshore, aboard a ship, perhaps. While seafaring is an aspect of maritime landscape, the interface between the sea and the land is itself a vibrant, active space, a place where humans simultaneously interact with one another and with the marine environment, and where societies engaged in activities for a living offshore, or near shore, construct intersecting yet distinct identities for themselves.
Often the cultural boundaries separating maritime societies and land-oriented populations are as sudden and dynamic as the physical boundary between land and sea. Nevertheless, boundary spaces often are permeable at different scales and represent just one element of cognitive cultural landscapes imposed on the physical environment by social groups. As cogently examined by Ben Ford (2011) the narrow strand of land that borders the sea can be a bridging space connecting maritime and land-oriented societies in physical and cognitive maritime landscapes, and is in fact less a barrier than is generally conceived. Just as the sea has historically served more as a super highway than an obstacle, Ford found the land–water interface to be almost seamless.
Language informs our understanding of space and betrays our internal construction of space in terms of known and unknown, of familiar and feared. Landscapes are ultimately cognitive constructs. J. Edward Hood captured the essence of this geo-linguistic inquiry in an essay concerning the construction of cultural landscapes. In Hood’s perceptive analysis, landscapes are “perceived and categorized into culturally relevant entities” and create cognitive boundaries affecting behaviors (Hood 1996, 122). The vocabulary societies use has consequences for the space to which it is applied. Phrases in common use—such as land’s end, frontier, virgin land, unexplored territory, or even wrong-side-of-the-tracks—map on to the cognitive terrain no less than the physical and are freighted with meanings that shape interactions that individuals and societies have with those spaces (see Zedeño and Bower 2009). The same phenomenon occurs as we look out to sea, perhaps salted with a bit of trepidation. The conceptualization of boundaries suggests otherness in a cognitive sense where boundaries demarcate spaces as different in some manner even when no physical barrier is present. Nonetheless, various social groups adapt to these environments with different strategies. While this volume is explicitly atheoretical, it nevertheless embraces landscape theory on two levels, spatially and cognitively. The main objective is to identify and define the many characteristics of maritime landscapes and how people interact within those environments, in a manner approachable by the general public, not merely the archaeological or social science community. While each set of authors has framed their work in a theoretical context, we have minimized theoretical discourse, which those in the discipline may already be familiar with but which the general reader may find taxing.
To the European explorers who sailed the California coast in the sixteenth century it was the “edge of the world,” and the rocky, fog enshrouded northern coast, so different from the south, only enhanced their impression of a fearsome place. By extension, those who inhabited such a place were conceived as no less exotic and dangerous. Those who inhabited California’s coastal regions for thousands of years before European invasion had their own conception of the world and relationship with the sea in that world. Hood built on a rich literature concerning landscape and space examining the intersection of lived experience and physical infrastructure (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984; Harvey 1973; Hodder 1986; Paynter 1982). Many other scholars influencing Hood perceived landscapes in terms of production (Harvey 1985; Marx [1867] 1967) and identity (Leone 1984), with production defined in various ways but always as a cultural process. These classic works were foundational in the formulation of the modern perspectives of landscape in archaeology today combining sociocognitive frameworks with places (Hardesty 1985; McGuire and Paynter 1991; Rubertone 1989; Zedeño 2000; Zedeño and Bower 2009; to cite only a few who have studied landscape from a cognitive angle, which has shaped the perspective taken in this book). The chief point that we can distill from the insights of these researchers is that “landscape plays an important role in constituting human society” (Hood 1996, 125). The converse is also true; societies create landscapes through interaction with the spaces they inhabit. Landscapes become cultural through human modifications to create purposeful spaces and result from modifications and behaviors enacted within these manipulated environments (Butzer and Butzer 2000; Lewis 1993) and as such “constitute a kind of document” (Lewis 1993, 116). Butzer and Butzer focused on the vernacular symbolism that is incorporated into landscapes to reinforce behaviors among and between groups through built environment. This practice is demonstrated by many of the case studies presented in this volume.
Maritime cultural landscapes heuristically wed three distinct concepts to explore a recognizable, albeit ephemeral, phenomenon; at the most basic, such landscapes incorporate those who extract a living from maritime venues and activities with those who share a lived experience doing so. More broadly, maritime implies a particular orientation and suite of activities associated with the marine environment, which are cultural spaces in the sense that groups of people of similar heritage participate and share experiences related to the marine environment. Landscape suggests uniquely constructed spaces connected to the marine environment. By extension, those members of a cultural group who interact in this environment form the nucleus of a community. Yet, there is more to community than sharing similar occupations or living space. There are many types of communities so it should not be surprising to find diversity in the communities in these chapters. This variation will be discussed further below. Here it is enough to highlight the complexity of definitions.
The term community must be deconstructed before we get too far as this single word implies many different things in differing contexts and is entangled with landscapes in subtle ways. Anthropologists and sociologists have wrestled with the concept of community for a long time, and it is clear the term lacks a clear definition, or at least its definition is contingent on factors not embodied by the word itself. It is incumbent on archaeologists to be “cautious of labeling any group as X-community” (di Leonardo 1984, 131) based on a few shared elements or external categorization of traits. The bonds that join groups into communities must serve to sustain the group and benefit the individual in demonstrable ways; and associations must not be tenuous. But we may ask, which attributes are the glue that creates the bonds? Some communities are more tightly knit than others or may manifest despite separation by great distances. Connectivity may be possible only through intersection with maritime pathways. This volume did not come about from a conference symposium but as an orchestrated effort to explore these intersections and connectivity in differing contexts.
As Marx and Jaffke frame the issue (Chapter 8, this volume), the concept of maritime cultural landscapes is not new but a new terminology is certainly called for, one that does not privilege the “land” in the “scape.” First brought into use by Westerdhal (1992), “maritime cultural landscapes” has gradually been adopted as a working model in archaeological studies examining maritime economies and lifestyles from archaeological deposits. The definition of maritime cultural landscapes in California was clarified by Gusick et al. (2019) with a landmark article published in the journal California Archaeology. Gusick et al. traced the origins of the concept of maritime landscape and its application to California. It is not necessary to repeat to a great extent the framework provided in the article. It is sufficient here to highlight a few constructs adopted for this book.
Archaeologists of island and coastal studies have long understood and embraced the model discussed above. Placing societies into spatial context recognizes unique characteristics of economics, social integration, and interactions by individuals and groups with their environments as well as with groups that recognizably are not maritime in character or intent. Combining landscape theory with the archaeology of maritime economy, along with submerged cultural resources, did more than illuminate a new data set; it opened new ways of conceptualizing the archaeological record (Gusick et al. 2019, 140).
The three concepts informing our greater understanding of the constitution of maritime cultural landscapes are: societies that share a common suite of behaviors associated with economic or resource dependency have a maritime basis; interactions between terrestrial-oriented societies and maritime-focused groups is generally economic in scope; and that specialized technology or knowledge is necessary to sustain the group over time as it exploits resources from a maritime context. Communities within these landscapes frequently have specific assemblages of material culture and mechanisms for survival identifiable in the archaeological record. Such communities may be found within larger cultural groups at a broader scale. Maritime needs and constraints affected settlement patterns and connected dispersed communities to global economies both knowingly and inadvertently.
Variation among maritime cultures is as diverse and colorful as the range of shoreline landscapes that these societies inhabit. Whether along inland waterways, estuarine spaces, ocean front, coastal doghole, or on ice, maritime societies harbor unique adaptations technologically and culturally; each behavior leaves distinctive fingerprints in the archaeological record accessible through archaeological interpretation of material culture. These traces include technologies, symbols, and socially constructed use of space. While this variation spans thousands of miles of the West Coast, from South America to Canada, this volume and its authors are focused on California diversity.
It is essential to remember that maritime cultural landscapes are human landscapes, not abstract spaces. Individual behaviors are shaped by the society within which they function and in opposition to other societies with which they interact. Opportunities, successes, failures, adaptations, or transformations are all contingent: contingent on the physical and social spaces they are confined to; that legally constrain mobility or socially proscribe where they may congregate; and the cultural heritages these groups subscribe to. Illustrating this point further we can briefly use as an example the Italian fishermen on the San Francisco Bay, just one cultural entity that could also be found in Monterey, San Diego, and other locations along the coast. As will be discussed further in the chapter devoted to this group, their status was in many ways unstable, and it transformed over the years, from the Gold Rush era into the twentieth century. Fishermen were just one subset of a larger immigrant group. Indeed, the very definition of Italian itself was in flux along with citizenship (Meniketti, Chapter 5, this volume). Influences affecting practitioners of maritime trades included: ethnicity; political leanings regarding Italian unification occurring at the time; class; traditional occupational choices; de facto membership in “Italian” communities writ large (defined by official census) with which they often had little contact; stereotyping by the popular press; pressures from or manipulation by organized labor; and special tax laws targeting their trade, to cite only the most obvious factors. Few if any of these factors had anything directly to do with earning a living from fishing. These fishermen had to be masters of their vessels, experts at catching fish, and business savvy, all the while negotiating the myriad aspects of life ashore, and as immigrants, learning a new language and accommodating unfamiliar cultural practices. When viewed externally, vis a vis the dominant Anglo society, they were a readily identifiable “other.”
We must not lose sight of the fact that these are also gendered landscapes. Women are as much a factor in maritime cultures as men, perhaps with specialized responsibilities and areas of expertise, and notable associated material culture. The experience of bigotry was shared among many immigrant groups, most of whom were not maritime oriented. It might seem as though these persons could be called a “community” from their shared misery and experience of officially sanctioned discrimination, but this is too simplistic a view. Yet, several attributes, such as origin, language, clothing, and politics coalesced to produce a recognizable social group distinct from others practicing the same maritime orientation. By this calculus the Italian fishermen in San Francisco had more affinity to fishermen in Monterey than to other Italians in San Francisco who pursued occupations on land and were perhaps ethnically distinct.
Maritime cultural landscapes are also economic and technological landscapes as procuring a resource often entails specialized knowledge and equipment, not the least of which are the watercraft employed, whether it be a tule reed raft, sewn-plank canoe, felucca, shrimp junk, shore-launched whale boat, two-masted schooner overloaded with timber, or a fully rigged ship. Maritime cultural landscapes are also extractive enterprises impacting environments no less than mining, timbering, or farming. California’s modern history and prosperity is based almost entirely on the extractive industry of these types (Walker 2001). Shipbuilding represents another example, although not addressed in this volume.
Because ships and boats are the most obvious indicator of the maritime landscape, it is natural that nautical archaeologists are drawn to the study of maritime landscapes and that shipwrecks are the most commonly thought of archaeological deposit. While it is true that shipwrecks comprise a significant element of maritime cultural landscapes, so too do harbors, docks, wharfs, and lighthouses, and ephemeral shore stations. Submerged sites are not limited to ill-fated ships but certainly include inundated villages, moorings, collapsed piers, anchors, and shipbuilding slips. Submerged prehistoric sites of the coast must also be considered—lost to rising seas. All are associated with maritime communities and comprise important aspects of the maritime cultural landscape.
The early sixteenth century was pivotal to the lives of native cultures of California and the European worldview alike. Spanish explorers made their first entrée to the shores of Alta California in 1540 with the voyage of Juan Cabrillo, who it is believed sailed as far north as Mendocino (Ashley 2009). His death on Santa Rosa Island in 1543 brought a brief pause in exploration. The Spanish Crown did not see much value in California, at least not until the Manila trade was well established, and then saw it only as a way station. Barely a generation later, however, the rate of contact increased dramatically with Spanish and English and Dutch voyages along the coast. The Manila trade after 1565 brought Spanish ships enroute from the Philippines to Acapulco close to the coast with commodities from Asia bound for Spain in an intricate economic web (Meniketti 2021). English privateer Francis Drake, having rounded the southern tip of South America, burst into the Pacific and made contact at several points along the coast while plundering Spanish shipping. Drake made landfall at Point Reyes in 1579. Scarcely sixteen years later the Manila galleon, San Agustin, commanded by Rodriguez Cermeño, arrived at Point Reyes and encountered the same peoples who would have confronted Drake. The ship was wrecked during a storm while anchored in the bay (Heizer 1941; Schurz 1939; Wagner 1924). The interactions between the shipwrecked crew and the Indigenous population were fraught according to Cermeño’s testimony. It is an interesting sidenote that the crew was not entirely Spanish, but likely included ethnically Chinese and Philippine sailors, marking the first truly international contact on the coast.
Cermeño continued his mission to map the coast in search of a safe harbor for galleons in an open barca (small shallow draft deckless vessel) and made contact at several locations as he voyaged south. Ironically, Cermeño made first for the Farollones, islands twenty-five miles out from Point Reyes, and thereby completely missed the San Francisco Bay—just as Drake had—a historical accident that undoubtedly preserved the life of Indigenous peoples of the bay region for at least two centuries. In 1602 Sebastian Vizcaino, sailing north from Acapulco mapped the entire coast on his way to Point Reyes, doing away with many place names bestowed by Cabrillo and applied his own. Indigenous place names were, for the most part, ignored—the beginning of the erasure of Indigenous culture. Vizcaino’s mission was to see what could be salvaged from the San Agustin. Following Cermeño’s maps, Vizcaino explored Monterey Bay and also missed the entrance to San Francisco Bay, arriving at Point Reyes in 1602. Vizcaino found nothing of the wreck. In a span of less than thirty years, the Miwok living near Point Reyes were forced to confront Europeans at an alarming rate. The health of Indigenous populations may have been compromised from contact (Erlandson et al. 2001). The material, symbolic, and psychological repercussions of such contact is closely examined in this volume by Matthew A. Russell in Chapter 3.
From the Vizcaino voyage in 1602 until the arrival of Russians in 1812, there was little maritime interaction between Europeans and California’s coastal tribes although Indigenous peoples engaged in maritime resource extraction in several localities on the coast. Spanish development moved northward from Baja California at the pace of the Missions. Interaction with privateers and smugglers cannot be ruled out. Ironically, the San Francisco Bay was not encountered by sea but by a land expedition. Although the Spanish built a Presidio at what would later be San Francisco, maritime activity was minimal. The Russian exploitation of native Alaskans, Aleuts, and local Pomo in the seal and otter fur trade centered at Fort Ross represent one of the first examples of major maritime extractive enterprises by Europeans on the coast that cast multiple cultural entities together (Lightfoot 1997; Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998). The exploitation of otters reached as far south as the Channel Islands and did not end before the populations of seals and otters were decimated. The Russians also built ships at the fort. Russian presence on the coast of what Spain considered its own frontier inspired the Spanish Crown to invest briefly in new exploration. This enterprise ended with the Mexican Revolution, which also halted the continuation of the Mission system. Yankee maritime activity on the coast during the Mexican Period was largely limited to trading or smuggling at seaports supporting the missions, described in detail by Richard Henry Dana in his classic, Two Years Before the Mast ([1840] 1948). Dana could not have known, but the Gold Rush was just around the corner and the maritime highway would transform the region beyond recognition.
Marine-based occupations—fishing, collecting, or harvesting marine resources near shore, manufacturing the technologies used in maritime activities by others (rope or sail making, and boat building for instance) or actually braving the open sea in a canoe or as a crew aboard a ship—can be the genesis of unique perspectives, folkways, and social enclaves, which, when spliced together, are distinct when compared with cultural entities that do not share these experiences. Social identities, or aspects of cultural values can be shaped from this seaward orientation. Shared identities and values create bonds that are hallmarks of community often subsumed by greater cultural constructs. As an example, a sailor and a farmer may reside and work in different environments yet speak the same language, share the same religion—although it may manifest differently according to circumstances—and be buried in the same cemetery. They are in fact actors within overlapping communities. The stereotypic and often comical portrayal of the “hapless landlubber” hopelessly seasick interacting aboard ship with seasoned veterans of the wine-dark sea can be viewed as the encounter of two cultures as foreign to one another as any that ever met during the age of discovery.
As previously discussed, the term “community” frequently is applied without sufficient thought as if the term coalesces a group’s identity and defines a group in a commonly understood manner; yet many so-called communities are externally labeled—its constituents determined from the outside—and may have deep rooted differences in philosophy, ethnic composition, historical trajectories, political animosities, and self-identification that defy easy categorization. To say “the fishing community” is to cast a very wide net that masks more than it reveals. As archaeologists and social scientists, we must be cognizant and cautious of simplistic interpretations that inadvertently reify stereotypes through an act of analysis. It is important to first discover what connects a group internally. Italian fishermen, Chinese fishermen, Indigenous fishermen are not the same “community” but constitute different maritime cultural entities, each with its own nuanced spectrum of inclusivity, with their own adaptive strategies. And within these categories are recognizable subgroups. We should be wary of creating these categories without careful reflection on the tacit assumption that, for instance, ethnicity or economy is the definitive characteristic or scale for analysis.
Chinese shrimpers, Portuguese shore whalers, Miwok harvesting mussels in low tidal zones, Chumash paddling to the Channel Islands in plank canoes, and timber schooner crews do not constitute a mutual community by virtue of all drawing on the sea for a living in one fashion or another. Yet each is certainly a maritime cultural community in a defined maritime landscape of its own, and each constructs a cultural perspective about the land/sea interface and the sea itself that terrestrially based societies often find difficult to fathom. These multivalent perspectives and land/sea interactions constitute maritime landscapes. Moreover, the seasonality of resources and the moods of the seas contribute to cultural adaptations both material and ephemeral, and many are uniquely expressed in song, folk wisdom, crafts, specialized technologies, fears, uncertainties, and measured joys; all are attributes accessible through archaeology and social anthropology. Maritime cultural landscapes are comprised of diverse communities that can be defined by their shared occupational outlook and unique hazards. The farmer we spoke of above, working near town, even a shore town, expects to return home in the evening. A fisherman may not. This reality gives rise to a mindset, on which there will be more to say later, we suggest here that land-oriented and marine-oriented societies have dramatically different worldviews even if part of a broader cultural collective.
This maritime worldview can be found true of Indigenous societies who forage the seas or systematically exploit the marine environments for resources and economic advantage. Island and coastal societies also share similar worldviews shaped by a maritime environment. The maritime adaptation may have economic roots or be part of an avoidance of conflict strategy (Jones and Codding, Chapter 2, this volume). At times, the resources exploited can be integrated into a society culturally beyond the role of subsistence. Salmon play an integral role in society of Indigenous fishing cultures today in northern California—as food, in mythology, in identity—a trait shared with cultures further north in the Pacific Northwest.
The chapters in this volume represent investigations of a select handful of maritime communities. By no means do we imagine these groups described in the chapters an exhaustive list, this is a thin slice from a very large pie. The varied maritime communities and ways of analyzing them could fill volumes, and perhaps one day will. Some of the communities discussed here left tangible marks in the archeological landscape while others are known better through the documentary and ethnographic record. The range of communities—and unraveling how they sustained themselves or interacted with neighboring groups—could keep anthropologists and archaeologists busy for multiple lifetimes.
This book might have been structured in many different ways, and several were considered. Chronologically seemed appropriate, as did type of resource exploited, by groups employing specific technologies, and so forth. Ultimately, chronological structure was deemed the best approach allowing readers to ponder the historical trajectory of maritime cultures in California’s cultural landscape. Figure 0.1 illustrates the locations of sites along the long California shore discussed in the chapters.
Figure 0.1. Map showing the relative locations of the various sites discussed in the chapters. Map by Marco Meniketti.
This volume has been divided into parts that reflect the timeframe of maritime culture as well as the structure of community. Part I explores Indigenous societies developing resources over millennia. Part II examines postcontact immigrant groups carving out a niche in the capitalist driven economy through extractive industries, drawing the bounty of the sea. Part III investigates groups serving as carriers of product or recyclers of technology—maritime higglers—extracting a living, not from the sea itself, but as conduits of the commodity stream.
A shortcoming in this volume that we recognize is the lack of an Indigenous perspective among the chapters. While Indigenous landscapes are addressed through archaeological context, an Indigenous voice and chapter authored by a member of a Native California community would certainly have enhanced and strengthened this work. This is an issue we will address in any subsequent volume.
The first chapters of this volume explore the evolving maritime cultural adaptations of California’s first peoples; a process that was neither immediate nor constant. In Chapter 1, Amy E. Gusick et al. first provide background on the development of maritime cultural landscape research giving context for the varied approaches archaeologists are deploying to gain insights into past interactions between people and their environments. Gusick and her colleagues then discuss the paleocoastal environment that impacted ancient Chumash culture in the Channel Islands region in a recently nominated National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Sanctuary for Chumash Heritage. The chapter provides an interesting contrast with Chapter 4 as Todd J. Braje and Linda Bentz examine the same maritime landscape as it functioned for a later cultural group. Gusick et al. follow a geophysical approach to investigate deep channel sediments and submerged landscapes, to harvest past paleoenvironmental and paleolandscape data in order to determine how that landscape and associated ecology has changed over time.
In Chapter 2, Terry L. Jones and Brian F. Codding investigate the maritime adaptation along California’s central coast from at least ten thousand years BP and suggest that various environmental factors influenced the settlement and resource patterns evident in the archaeological record prior to contact. The analysis by Jones and Codding is a fitting early chapter for this volume as they provide the long view for the state before contact and disruption from outside. The first serious focus on maritime resources appears to correspond with a period of prolonged drought associated with the Medieval Climate Anomaly. A second period of intensification of maritime orientation and increased extraction of marine resources with concomitant patterns away from inland resources is detectable at the time of Spanish intrusion along the coast after 1772, potentially as a strategy by Northern Chumash to avoid contact. Jones and Codding provide a detailed sampling of the site Tstyiwi, near San Luis Obispo, tracing the progression from Milling Stone culture to the late prehistoric precontact phase of cultural development. Using ethnographic accounts to complement archaeological finds, Jones and Codding describe the material culture associated with the maritime adaptation: tule boats, fishhooks, net weights, and associated manufacturing residue. Comparing data from various sites along the coast, Jones and Codding suggest that the maritime orientation of these coastal communities was just one of several resource extraction strategies employed in response to environmental circumstances.
Matthew A. Russell reexamines the nature of first cross-cultural contact in Chapter 3 and challenges past interpretations of events that have mainly provided European perspectives. Russell’s analysis bridges the prehistoric and historic maritime cultural landscapes as he reconsiders the wreck of the San Agustin in 1595 at Point Reyes from the Miwok point of view using European artifacts from midden sites that were repurposed for use including pendants and beads fashioned from Chinese porcelains from the wreck, along with other objects. Russell’s analysis interrogates the notion that the Miwok use of the exotic material culture was influenced by the Spanish, but rather that they incorporated it into cultural practices from a purely Indigenous understanding of the encounter. Russell reviews findings from fifteen sites within the Drake’s Bay Historic and Archaeological District that contained objects traceable to either the Drake or Cermeño contact episodes, statistically assessing distribution patterns of specific artifact classes. Significant variation of association between the European items and the nature of deposits hint at symbolic rather than utilitarian functions. Intriguingly, many porcelain fragments were found associated with concentrations of objects associated with hunting and fishing activities which may indicate ceremonial relationships of value to the Miwok. Combining oral histories with archaeological finds, Russell unveils a cognitive landscape into which the artifacts from the maritime interaction were integrated by the Coast Miwok and possibly into long established trade networks. Russell’s discussion concludes the first part of the book and serves as a transition to the more impactful period of European colonization in California two centuries later.
The second part of this book samples from the diversity of groups arriving in California after the Mexican period and annexation by the United States. As the Gold Rush unfolded in the state, wresting land from Indigenous cultures and interfering with traditional resource bases of Indigenous peoples was the norm and officially sanctioned. Various immigrant groups arrived in California with myriad goals and expectations which changed after the first days of the Gold Rush and into the late nineteenth century.
San Francisco Bay became home to several immigrant fishing communities and the most historically colorful were the Italians—mostly Genoese—who plied the bay in distinctive, traditional sailing feluccas. In Chapter 5, Marco Meniketti centers a discussion of the Italian experience on the felucca, a traditional craft with Mediterranean origins used by Italians and Greek fishermen, which gave the community a distinctive symbol of identity and apparent cohesiveness, despite other, less visible deep divisions. Although Italians could be seen in numerous occupations ranging from agriculture to fishing throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, Meniketti suggests that it was the fishing sector in particular that came to be associated with Italians and a vital element of the localized maritime economy. Beginning almost as early as the Gold Rush and extending until the early twentieth century, immigrants from Italy made up an important part of California’s economy. Being integral to the economy, however, did not provide a barrier against discrimination and bigotry then, any more than it does today for recent immigrants to California. Meniketti discusses the many political, cultural, and labor forces shaping the Italian experience, including the pressures exerted from outside the state as the politics of Italian unification reached California’s shores.
The entrepreneurial scope of abalone harvesting by Chinese immigrants in the years immediately following the Gold Rush is documented by Todd J. Braje and Linda Bentz in Chapter 4. Abalone harvesters were a subset of a broader fishing community of Chinese culture in California. The value of this marine commodity was largely unrecognized and untapped by Anglo-Europeans and the harvest became part of a thriving export market to China. Chinese immigrants were subject to more intense discrimination and official bigotry in the state than nearly any other group. With the expansion of immigration during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Chinese fishermen established enclaves and temporary settlements throughout the state from San Diego to the Sonoma coast and inland along the Sacramento River Delta. Specialization in black abalone came to be associated with Chinese fishing communities as much as shrimping, and use of traditional sampans in the shallows is documented on the coast. It is interesting to note that contemporary newspaper accounts often derided the sampan as flimsy and awkward, yet these vessels were ideally suited to the purpose for which they were employed. Braje and Bentz briefly inform us about the important environmental and economic interactions that disrupted the abalone trade—with impacts felt to this day—and of state-sanctioned discrimination against the Chinese as harsh laws were passed to restrict Chinese fishing, actions taken to facilitate white business interests taking over the industry. Archaeological evidence of the abalone trade is found in the Channel Islands outposts off southern California, and Braje and Bentz detail some of the characteristics of remnant material culture and the ephemeral nature of the sites. Among the secondary activities is the market in abalone shell for decorative purposes. Braje and Bentz remind us that the anti-Asian sentiments and vitriol that has raised its ugly head in recent times are not new and are embedded in the fabric of California history.
The pathway of Portuguese to California through participation in shore whaling enterprises by Azorean immigrants, and the social and cultural transformation that ensued, is discussed in Chapter 6 from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective with a case study of the Portuguese community in San Jose. Authors Catherine Mistely, Karen Johansson, and Marco Meniketti explore both, a physical landscape with vestiges of shore whaling, and a dynamic cultural landscape that changed over time as the Portuguese shore whalers transitioned to farmers within a generation. This particular maritime community, once vibrant, symbolizes a community of convenience as many of the shore whalers had come to California from the Azores with skills that provided immediate positioning in the economics of the state, while actually serving as a means of immigrating. The Azorean pipeline was significant and long lasting. Although shore whaling was a profitable enterprise for the companies for which they labored, the whalers themselves profited little, and had their eyes on other prizes. Within a generation many had left whaling to become farmers, timber cutters, and business owners in thriving Portuguese neighborhoods throughout the state, but explicitly congregating in San Jose. Mistely and colleagues point out that from the perspective of archaeology, any debate about how immigrants become incorporated into mainstream society has implications for the interpretation of material culture. Sites seen as repositories of everyday immigrant experience, be it habitation or labor zones, more likely represent a dynamic rather than linear process of adaptation in response to the host society’s definition of national identity. Whaling was a means for Azorean young men to reach America, rather than a continued way of life once they became established in locations such as California.
The final part of this volume shifts our attention to occupations of a different character; from direct resource extraction to maritime communities of a different sort supporting other industry. In Chapter 7, Sheli Smith exhaustively surveys the recycling and repurposing of ships as these hulks became tangible features of the terrestrial landscape, or gradual elements of underwater cultural heritage, visual evidence of the maritime connections between San Francisco and the outside world. During the heyday of the Gold Rush, ships arrived in San Francisco from ports around the world delivering fortune seekers of all nationalities and the cargo to supply them, feed them, and keep them from going thirsty. Captains of vessels found it difficult to keep crews from abandoning the ships to seek wealth for themselves in the diggings. Many of the ships ended their days as derelicts, according to Smith, and were used in a variety of unique ways their shipwrights could never have imagined (or would have caused them to get drunk if they had imagined it). Repurposed ships became hotels, jails, storehouses, restaurants, and casinos. Smith recounts the astonishing growth of San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and the various ways ship were repurposed, recycled, or reused. Just as often ships were simply sunk in place to get them out of the way or with the intent to build out over them; the hulks serving as little more than wooden forms to hold landfill as the bay filled and the shoreline expanded. In fact, the San Francisco corporate headquarters of Levi’s is built above several ships sunk in place in the 1850s—fitting considering the Levi jeans were first made from sails.
The inglorious end to many ships supported a small industry of ship breakers and speculators. Some vessels were sunk for sightseeing while others became artificial reefs. Smith captures the free-for-all character of early San Francisco and follows the careers of several ships from their first sailings to their demise on the shores and mudflats around the growing city. Community has two meanings in Smith’s account: there are those who were employed in breaking up ships for salvageable parts or who repurposed the vessels into floating buildings, and the broader community that benefited economically from the recycling or repurposing. Today, one such example is the “mini fleet” of vessels sunk in Lake Tahoe that makes up California’s first underwater State Park and now a popular destination for the sport diving community.
In closing, Chapter 8, Deborah Marx and Denise Jaffke combine physical landscape and community memory with altered landscapes in the coves and inlets of California’s rugged north coast where small communities clung to the rocks and hillsides in towns to serve the logging industry. Despite marginal existence these small towns delivered the product of extraction—redwood timber—by sea in schooners. Before roads or rail lines were constructed the only way to get the timber to market and to get goods from San Francisco to reach the timber towns, was by sea. Here maritime connectivity is definitive. Most harbors on the north coast were ports more in name than fact. These mill towns were situated at harbors so small that only a “dog could turn around in them,” hence the appellation, dogholes. Marx and Jaffke trace the origin of the timber industry of the north coast from the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century when roads finally made the schooner transport obsolete. Using company records, newspaper accounts, and archaeology of the physical landscape that stand as reminders of past extractive activities, Marx and Jaffke bring alive the economies and operations of the towns simultaneously examining the legacy of the altered environment. Most of the infrastructure is gone, but what remains, including shipwrecks, reveals the scope of operations to extract lumber. Using the archeological survey of Salt Point Landing as a case study, Marx and Jaffke connect the remote port to the metropolis through carriage of commerce by sea, noting that hundreds of schooners served these dangerous coastal harbors by taking away cut timber, railroad ties, and cord wood, while delivering manufactured goods to the communities. The captains of these doghole schooners, as they were known, were intrepid indeed, never actually tying up to piers but mooring just outside the rocky shore, held fast by stout cable and a prayer. Marx and Jaffke describe the complex and ingenious, yet precarious, technology employed to load timber to schooners moored just beyond the cliffs.
On more than one occasion winds and swells separated ships from their moorings and wrecking ashore was inevitable. Underwater survey at Salt Point revealed remains of such unfortunate vessels. The clear-cutting of timber that once reached to the shore permanently changed the landscape making way for cattle grazing where forest once stood. Many of the small towns have either faded away or have transformed into boutique villages and artist enclaves, attracting weekend tourists with bed and breakfast lodging from which locals extract an income by selling a romantic image of the seafaring past.
It is common to think of maritime cultures in terms of ships and sailors, and, of course, such a conception is appropriate; it is simply incomplete and limited in scope. Maritime communities are complex and far more than ships at sea. The definition encompasses the families of sailors in towns with an economic dependency on the pursuit of maritime interests. The builders of ships or the crafter of a canoe also belong. Maritime communities draw resources from the sea from its edge or by venturing out on the unpredictable waves. It is not a pastime but a way of life. Fishermen, shellfish harvesters, boat builders, fish mongers, stevedores, longshoremen, sailmakers, sardine or salmon cannery workers, lighthouse keepers, shore patrol, and the like are connected through their livelihood. The interdependence of social groups provides connectivity and community. These occupations may overlap ethnic categories, gender, and age sets. In some cases, subsets can be identified, as for example black whaling crews commanded by black captains within the whaling industry.1 Indeed, a survey of schooner captains and boatwrights on the west coast reveals that the majority were of Scandinavian origin—constituting yet another viable community. In California, all were immigrants, including the Anglo population that came to dominate. Some may live among others of similar occupation, in enclaves, or may live among those of similar ethnic and cultural background, but with entirely different economic pursuits—dual connectivity affecting material culture and social expression. In such cases individuals bridge communities and have multiple affiliations. A fisherman of Italian heritage for instance, may live in the heart of the city of San Francisco. He is part of the “Italian community” and also the “fishing community.” He will likely be identified as part of an “immigrant community” by the mainstream society, thereby lumping him in with all other immigrants. An ethnically Chinese abalone harvester was part of a village, the “immigrant community,” but also connected at one end of a supply chain linked to international maritime trade. These intersecting experiences of an individual reflect the experience of whole populations negotiating existence between cultures and navigating between landscapes. In San Francisco, the Italians living in North Beach abutted Chinatown and interaction of these groups were often competitive, yet could yield interesting fusion. One San Francisco restaurant today bordering the same intersectional neighborhood serves entrées inspired by Italian and Chinese seafood cuisine.
This volume is just a starting point. Numerous groups were left out of this volume for various reasons. Many are cogently investigated elsewhere. Whalers, dock workers, harbor pilots, and others wait ethnoarchaeological discussion and interpretation. Furthermore, not all of California’s myriad maritime communities are historic; we could easily devote chapters to communities of today, crabbers, salmon fishers, northern tribes, offshore petroleum exploration and energy development, longshoremen, harbor pilots and salvagers. The work to interpret the intersections of so many maritime communities has only just begun.
Marco Meniketti holds a PhD in Historical Archaeology from Michigan State University and is Senior Archaeologist at San Jose State University. He is a member of the Register of Professional Archaeologists. Dr. Meniketti is past chair of the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club. His research focuses on maritime archaeology, labor, capitalism, industrial technology, and environmental change. For over twenty-five years he has directed projects in the study of Caribbean slavery, the sugar industry, and their impacts on bounded environments. In 2012 he was featured on The National Geographic Channel in a special about the pirates of Port Royal, Jamaica. Dr. Meniketti has worked in association with California State Parks investigating the timber industry through the lens of labor and environmental transformation, which formed the basis of his most recent book: Timber, Sail, and Rail: An Archaeology of Industry, Immigration, and the Loma Prieta Mill (2020).
1. The life story of Captain William Shorey of Oakland, a native of Barbados, is a case in point. Shorey commanded all-Black crews in the whaling trade and became prominent in Oakland society. A story that deserves telling.
Ashley, Raymond. 2009. “California’s Origin Story.” Mains’l Haul, Maritime Museum of San Diego. Journal of Pacific Maritime History 45(1&2): 9–21.
Bourdieu, Pierre.1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butzer, Karl, and Elizabeth Butzer. 2000. “Domestic Architecture in Early Colonial Mexico: Material Culture as (sub)text.” In Cultural Encounters with the Environment, ed. Alexander Murphy and Douglas Johnson, 17–37. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Dana, Richard Henry. (1840) 1948. Two Years Before the Mast. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company.
di Leonardo, Micalea. 1984. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian Americans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Erlandson, Jon M., Rick Torbin, Douglass Kennett, and Philip Walker. 2001. “Dates, Demography, and Disease: Culture Contact and Possible Evidence of Old World Epidemics Among the Protohistoric Island Chumash.” Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 37(3): 11–26.
Ford, Ben. 2011. “The Shoreline as Bridge, Not Boundary: Cognitive Maritime Landscapes of Lake Ontario.” In The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes: When the Land Meets the Sea, ed. Ben Ford, 63–80. New York: Springer.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.
Gusick, Amy E., Tricia Dodds, Denise Jaffke, Marco Meniketti, and Dave Ball. 2019. “Defining Maritime Cultural Landscapes in California.” California Archaeology 11(2): 139–64.
Hardesty, Donald. 1985. “Evolution of the Industrial Frontier.” In The Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries, ed. Stanton Green and Stephen Perlman, 213–29. New York: Academic Press.
Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 1985. Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Heizer, Robert. 1941. “Archaeological Evidence of Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño’s California Visit in 1595.” California Historical Quarterly 20(2): 315–28.
Hodder, Ian. 1986. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hood, J. Edward. 1996. “Social Relations and Cultural Landscapes.” In Landscape Archaeology, ed. Rebecca Yamin and Karen Methany, 121–146. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Leone, Mark. 1984. “Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Using the Rules of Perspective in the William Paca Garden in Annapolis, Maryland.” In Ideology, Power, and Prehistory, ed. Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley, 25–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, Pierce. 1993. “Common Landscapes as Historic Documents.” In History from Things: Essays in Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and David Kingery, 115–39. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lightfoot, Kent. 1997. “Culture Contact Around the Pacific Rim: Yesterday and Today.” Proceedings of the Society for California Archaeology 10: 88–92.
Lightfoot, Kent, Antoinette Martinez, and Ann Schiff. 1998. “Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California.” American Antiquity 63(2): 199–222.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1967. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers Co.
McGuire, Randall, and Robert Paynter, eds. 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Meniketti, Marco. 2021. “The Wreck of the Galleon San Agustín: A Case Study in Economics, Exploration, and European Development of the Pacific Rim.” In The Archaeology of Manila Galleons in the American Continent, ed. Scott Williams and Roberto Junco, 53–63. New York: Springer Press.
Paynter, Robert. 1982. Models of Spatial Inequality: Settlement Patterns in Historical Archaeology. New York: Academic Press.
Rubertone, Patricia. 1989. “Landscape as Artifact: Comments on the Archaeological Use of Landscape Treatment in Social, Economic, and Ideological Analysis.” Historical Archaeology 23(1): 50–54.
Schurz, William. 1939. The Manilla Galleons. New York: Dutton and Co.
Wagner, Henry. 1924. “The Voyage to California of Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño in 1595.” California Historical Quarterly April 3(1): 3–24.
Walker, Richard. 2001. “California’s Golden Road to Riches: Natural Resources and Regional Capitalism, 1848–1940.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91(1): 167–99.
Westerdahl, Christer. 1992. “The Maritime Cultural Landscape.” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 2(1): 5–14.
Zedeño, Maria Nieves. 2000. “On What People Make of Places: A Behavioral Cartography.” In Social Theory in Archaeology, ed. Michael Schiffer, 97–111. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Zedeño, Maria Nieves, and Brenda Bower. 2009. “The Archaeology of Meaningful Places.” In The Archaeology of Meaningful Places, ed. Maria Zedeño and Brenda Bowers, 1–14. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.