The success of the Milling Stone adaptation is measured by steady population growth which, despite the technological mastery of plant and other collectable foods, eventually outran productivity. In order to maintain the status quo, gatherer-hunters investigated alternative resources to supplement the diet. One of these alternatives was the acorn, and the Milling Stone lifestyle came to an end. But certain changes and innovations effected during the Milling Stone carried over, and indeed in greatly increased scale. These changes included developments in social and political organization represented by increased size of the traveling group, as well as in scheduled reoccupation of preferred localities and notions of territoriality.
The adoption of the acorn as a food staple was by no means a statewide simultaneous ‘event’. In certain regions, the shift to an emphasis on acorns coincided directly with the advent of the Late Holocene Period, c. 3500-4000 BP. In other regions, the Milling Stone strategy prevailed for another thousand years or more. This argues strongly that the development was driven by population growth. Population thresholds were met at differing times in different places. Only then were the labor-intensive requirements of an acorn economy adopted. Once adopted, however, the acorn economy had dramatic effects on social structure, settlement and mobility patterns, and political organization. As a cumulative effect, intensified resource acquisition both permitted and encouraged continued population growth, necessitating still more intensified labors, including reinvigorated hunting and, where possible, extensive use of littoral resources, especially shellfish.
Because the acorn ripens in the fall, acorn dependence required wholesale change in the nature of scheduling, and Californians became more fully organized along logistical principles. The notion of the ‘home base’ grew into one of the ‘home village’ that transcended generations, and villages were placed ‘logistically’ at locations within reasonable distance to many different resource-collecting locales. Collecting expeditions forayed from villages to these various resource ‘patches’ in their season, an efficient strategy that allowed surplus to be gathered and stored for use during the lean winter months. The logistical strategy thus placed a high value on prime collecting localities, many at some distance from the home village, and encouraged further the previously introduced concept of territory. It is during this time frame that archaeologists begin to see assemblages that are clearly attributable to specific ethnographic groups, suggesting that territories carved out in the beginning of the Late Holocene were maintained for numerous generations.
Among the first Californians to show the logistical strategy and to exploit the acorn were the Wind-miller of the Sacramento River Delta (Figure 1). Windmiller People (named for a site located on the Windmiller farm) first appeared around 4500 BP, but their peak occupation of the Sacramento Delta appears to have been between 2500-4000 BP. The Windmiller are primarily known from excavations of large cemeteries, which were placed on high ground above the Delta flood levels. Although the focus on grave goods may bias the data somewhat, the Windmiller interred their dead with quantities of everyday items in addition to nonutilitarian artifacts, which has provided a wealth of information about their overall material culture.
Windmiller material culture suggests a distinct divergence from the Milling Stone emphasis on hard seeds and other plant foods as well as from the strategy of continual mobility. Large quantities of projectile points as well as a wealth of faunal remains (deer, elk, pronghorn, rabbits) suggest a re-emergence of hunting as a significant occupation. Additionally, trident-form bone spears, shell and bone fishhooks, and baked-clay ‘netsinkers’ suggest three distinct methods for obtaining salmon and other fish from the Delta. In combination, seasonality in selected animal and fish species suggest that the Windmiller wintered in the Delta, and summered in the Sierra foothills. But more significantly, certain Windmiller sites show numbers of crude stone mortars and cobble pestles, ‘type artifacts’ for an acorn-based economy. Since the Delta region is practically devoid of oak trees, it is clear that the Windmiller practiced logistical forays for Central Valley and Sierra foothill acorns in the fall, as a supplement to winter fishing in the Delta and summer hunting in the Sierra Nevada.
Windmiller divergence from Milling Stone patterns was more than merely dietary. Windmiller grave lots show huge quantities of ornaments and other nonutilitarian items. Among the latter are enigmatic ‘charmstones’, polished cigar-shaped objects of finegrained stone such as alabaster, marble, or schist. Although their function is far from clear, charmstones were apparently highly treasured, and are typically found in only the most opulent grave lots. These and similar ‘wealth items’ such as steatite pipes, stone and bone beads, and shell pendants tend to be concentrated in male graves, suggesting gender-based status differentiation, which may reflect the reemergence of hunting as a significant pursuit. However, occasional discoveries of women, children, and even infants with immense quantities of grave goods suggests ascribed, or inherited status, a clear and further divergence from the more egalitarian Milling Stone.
Windmiller burials are occasionally observed with ‘nightstick’ fractures to the forearms, skull fractures, and points embedded in bone. This evidence for interpersonal violence may be a corollary to the logistical strategy, which may have occasioned a heightened sense of territoriality and defense of property or stores. A further corollary of the logistical strategy is purposeful acquisition of surplus for storage, which often results in an unequal distribution of food and other items, and which may in turn translate to ‘wealth’. Inequalities in wealth may account for dramatic differences observed among individuals in the abundance of associated grave goods. In short, Windmiller graves suggest there were ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. While by no means inevitable, both heightened territoriality and the concept of ‘wealth’ may be viewed as a consequence of the shift to an intensive, logistically organized acorn-based economy.
The Windmiller Culture provides a provocative example of the shifting economy in California and its consequences. Although not always precisely contemporary, regional synonyms for the development of the logistical, acorn-based economy, with frequent local variations, include the state-wide designation Early Pacific Period; the Campbell Tradition of coastal southern California; the University Village Complex, the West Berkeley Facies, and the Early Bay Pattern of the San Francisco Bay area; the Early Horizon of central California; The Martis Complex of the high Sierra Nevada; the Middle and Upper Archaic of the north coast; and the Gypsum Period of the deserts.
World History
