Customer Reviews

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

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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.