The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers [Hardcover]

Lynn H. Gamble (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520254414 | ISBN-13: 978-0520254411 | Publication Date: August 4, 2008 | Edition: 1

When Spanish explorers and missionaries came onto Southern California's shores in 1769, they encountered the large towns and villages of the Chumash, a people who at that time were among the most advanced hunter-gatherer societies in the world. The Spanish were entertained and fed at lavish feasts hosted by chiefs who ruled over the settlements and who participated in extensive social and economic networks. In this first modern synthesis of data from the Chumash heartland, Lynn H. Gamble weaves together multiple sources of evidence to re-create the rich tapestry of Chumash society. Drawing from archaeology, historical documents, ethnography, and ecology, she describes daily life in the large mainland towns, focusing on Chumash culture, household organization, politics, economy, warfare, and more.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In this masterful combination of empirical research, controlled comparison, and attention to contemporary theories regarding the social formations of hunger-gatherers, Gamble has contributed an authoritative, richly documented and illustrated synthesis of this fascinating time and place in protohistoric California."--Choice

"An important book. . . . One of the most vivid and sophisticated studies of any Indian group in North America at the point of their first sustained contact with Europeans."--Jrnl of American History

"Gamble's careful scholarship makes this text a fine template to be followed."--Jrnl of World History

"Gamble presents a significant contribution, both descriptively and methodologically, that will be of interest to a wide variety of anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and other researchers in California and around the world."--American Anthropologist

From the Inside Flap

"The Chumash World at European Contact is a major achievement that will be required reading and a fundamental reference in a variety of disciplines for years to come."--Thomas C. Blackburn, editor of December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives

"An extremely valuable synthesis of the historical, ethnographic, and archaeological record of one of the most remarkable populations of Native Californians."--Glenn J. Farris, Senior Archaeologist, California State Parks Department

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (August 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520254414
• ISBN-13: 978-0520254411
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,038,937 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly impressive ethnography, May 29, 2009

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E. N. Anderson (Riverside, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers (Hardcover)

This book is a truly superb ethnography, for a number of reasons.
"Chumash," originally a name for the people of the islands off Santa Barbara, became in the 19th century a general term for the speakers of several closely related languages in Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties, California. Along with their neighbors, especially the Tongva (Gabrielino), they created an astonishingly complex, elaborate, and rich society based on managing wild food stocks rather than on agriculture. They burned grasslands to produce fire-following annual seed plants, cultivated bulb and root plants, and managed nut trees for their products. They also fished, using plank canoes.
They have been interesting to anthropologists for over a century, because they created a society with large towns, chiefly hierarchies, occupational specialization, true money (made from clamshells), and hereditary elites, all without agriculture. They may even have had whole towns (on the islands) depending on imported staple foods (from the mainland), producing specialized manufactures to pay for the food. Earlier cultural-evolutionary models held this to be impossible. Such models are long abandoned, but the Chumash are still interesting, not least because we still don't understand quite how or why they did all this. One key was managing the vegetation comprehensively, and Lynn Gamble discusses this in detail, with current controversies well covered.
Lynn Gamble does a meticulous job of telling what we know about the Chumash of the mainland coast, using her own archaeological research, and also the huge amount of data available from other archaeology and from early ethnographic work. Most of the latter was done by John Peabody Harrington, who had a true obsession with Chumash culture. She also draws on biological anthropology (skeletal analyses, medical demography) and linguistics, thus harmoniously integrating all the classic "four fields" of anthropology. Anyone needing evidence, for their local anthro department, that four-field anthro is not only not dead but is still far superior than the alternatives, need only turn to this book for proof.
This book joins a number of extremely important recent books on the Chumash, by John Johnson, Jan Timbrook, Douglas Kennett, and several others.
The Chumash were once written off as extinct, but have come roaring back, and now have several organizations (and of course a casino). Current Chumash life is outside the scope of this book, but will soon be better reported, thanks to ongoing work by several students.
The interest of Gamble's volume, however, goes far beyond Chumash or California studies; it is a model of how archaeologists can deal with and write about complex local-level societies.