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by Guy Kovner,
from The Press Democrat,
1 July 1997.
PETALUMA — Scraping and picking through brick-hard adobe soil, an archaeological research crew at the Petaluma Adobe has recovered thousands of artifacts left behind 150 years ago by the Indians working for General Mariano Vallejo.From holes up to 2 feet deep in a field next to Adobe Creek, the diggers have in the past four weeks plucked about 8,000 chipped stones, animal bones, glass beads and other items that may help fill a historical blank by telling how Vallejo treated his workers.
The diggings have also revealed a cobblestone wall, at least 70 feet long, believed to be the foundation of a native workers' residence.
Steve Silliman, the UC Berkeley anthropology graduate student directing the excavation, marveled at the variety and volume of artifacts unearthed from just 17 holes, each one meter square, in the field below Vallejo's once-imposing adobe.
"There's no telling how much is out there," Silliman said, referring to the 41-acre Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park. Some 4,000 artifacts were collected in a surface survey before the digging started.
Today from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Silliman, state parks archaeologist Breck Parkman and the volunteer diggers will show the public what they've found at the park.
"It's one of the most important archaeological excavations ever conducted in the North Bay," said Parkman, who also has dug into the history of Indians at Fort Ross.
Another summer of digging and another year of laboratory analysis will be needed, Silliman said, before he interprets the tale told by so many mute bits of the past. But he's already confident the stone foundation dates back to the 1830s and '40s, when the adobe prospered as the commercialcenter of Vallejo's 44,000-acre empire.
Many of the tiny artifacts — grinding stones, flakes of chert, broken obsidian arrowheads — are "unequivocally native material," he said.
Vallejo's labor force included Patwin people from Solano County, Wappo from northern Napa County and the Coast Miwok native to the Petaluma Valley. Some historians believe the Indians who built the adobe and tended Vallejo's crops and livestock were slaves, although some Indians fought for Vallejo against other tribes.
Since Vallejo's records and other archives tell little about how the adobe workers lived, "that's where archaeology steps in," Silliman said.
For example, the prevalence of burned animal bones and the ash outline of burn pits near the stone wall indicate it was either a residence or a butchering area, he said. About 15 feet from the wall is another stone formation that puzzles Silliman because it seems too wide to be a wall.
From two nearby holes, believed to be trash dumps, the diggers have extracted iron belt buckles and nails, grinding stones, animal bones and glass bottle fragments.
The rock wall was pinpointed by a magnetometer survey of the adobe grounds, which clearly showed a long, linear "anomaly" below the surface, Silliman said.
But the actual digging, to be wrapped up next week, is painstakingly low-tech labor, with shovels, trowels and even dental picks to clean around larger animal bones. Each bucket of earth is carried to a wet-screening area, where volunteers spray away the soil, exposing rocks and artifacts on a mesh screen.
"It's not very glamorous," said Lori Zarr of Petaluma, a junior anthropology major at Sonoma State University.
Zarr said she volunteered to find out what field work is like, and joked that she may have gained five pounds of muscle. But the thrill of recovering a bead or an arrowhead relieves the tedium, she said.
The haul from the field helps Silliman toward his doctoral thesis, which may provide a new chapter in early California history. And some of the artifacts will ultimately be displayed at the Petaluma Adobe.
Copyright 1997, The Press Democrat
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