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Excavation of the Emeryville Shellmound, 1906: Nels C. Nelson's Final Report Transcribed and prefaced by Jack M. Broughton No. 54 of the Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility, Berkeley |
Excavation of the Emeryville Shellmound, 1906: Nels C. Nelson's Final Report
Transcribed and prefaced by Jack M. Broughton
No. 54 of the Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility, Berkeley
This publication reflects Nelson’s thorough, methodical work on the Emeryville Shellmound in California. The clearly written report carefully desribes the site, noting any distinctive characteristics. Twenty-seven pages of illustrations, including drawings of the excavation by Nelson, correspondence between Barrett and Merriam, and expense accounts for the 1906 excavation, follow the report. Paper. 2 plates, 50+ pp., 1996. $12.00.
From the Introduction:
In 1902, Max Uhle pioneered stratigraphic excavations in American archaeology at the deepest site in the greater San Francisco Bay: the Emeryville Shellmound (CA-ALA-309). Since these landmark, turn-of-the-century investigations, Emeryville has become one of the most well-known archaeological sites in North America and has attracted relentless interest by archaeologists.
In 1913, E. W. Gifford (1916) used materials from Emeryville in his seminal analysis of midden constituents, launching an approach that would later become known as the California School of midden analysis (Ambrose 1967). In her 1929 study of the Emeryville avifauna, Hildegarde Howard published what remains one of the premier analyses of bird remains from a North American archaeological site (Howard 1929). Artifacts from Emeryville have, of course, played a pivotal role in the development of central California culture history (Beardsley 1948; Bennyhoff 1986). Indeed, materials from Emeryville provided the linchpin for J. A. Bennyhoff's influential shell bead typology, which would ultimately find application throughout California and the Great Basin (Bennyhoff 1986; Bennyhoff and Hughes 1987).
Even though the present location of the long-since leveled mound now sadly serves, in part, as a toxic waste dump for a Sherwin-Williams paint factory, research on the Emeryville collections continues unabated. In ongoing analyses of the human remains from Emeryville, G. Richards (in press) has revealed an unprecedented case of prehistoric cranial surgery in North America. L. Ingram and B. Berry are currently investigating late Holocene climatic fluctuations from strontium isotope ratios obtained from Emeryville shell samples as well as radiocarbon reservoir effects from charcoal and shell samples. I re-cently conducted a stratigraphic analysis of the vertebrate materials collected from the site. That analysis documented that the inhabitants of Emeryville had substantial impacts on local vertebrate populations (Broughton 1995).
Given the unparalleled historic and scientific value of the Emeryville Shellmound, the following heretofore unpublished manuscript of Nels C. Nelson's 1906 excavation at Emeryville will be of great interest to scholars of both shell middens and the history of American archaeology in general, and to California archaeologists in particular. This report, manuscript number 348 of the Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley, describes in great detail the excavation of, and the materials obtained from, a six-foot square unit sunk to the base of the east side of the mound. Complete with original plates and a large series of detailed maps and figures, the manuscript represents an account of one of only three major excavations at Emeryville.
In 1906, the year of the excavation, Nels C. Nelson was a graduate student of the fledgling Anthropology program at U.C. Berkeley, a program that was led by Frederic Ward Putnam and funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst. The actual excavation was conducted by Nelson, A. V. Wepfer, and Pliny E. Goddard from May 28 to June 20, under the supervision of Samuel A. Barrett and John C. Merriam (see pages 34-36 of this volume for correspondence concerning the excavation). At the time, Wepfer, Goddard, and Barrett were also graduate students at Berkeley, while Merriam served as an Assistant Professor of Palaeontology as well as a member of the Advisory Committee which guided the young Department of Anthropology (see Thoresen 1975).
As a descriptive report, Nelson's 1906 manuscript provides far more detail on the character and composition of the internal structure of the Emeryville Shellmound than either Uhle (1909), whose earlier work was quite thorough, or Schenck (1926), whose efforts were certainly compromised by the salvage setting into which he was thrust. In fact, Nelson's highly detailed descriptions of the various natural strata and his meticulous excavation methods rival the standards of many current projects.
In the tabulation of artifact frequencies stratum by stratum, this report compares with the careful work of Uhle and hints of Nelson's later investigations in the Galisteo Basin (Nelson 1914) and the Tano Ruins (Nelson 1916). However, by presenting frequency data for major vertebrate classes stratigraphically, Nelson's report goes beyond what Uhle, Howard, or Schenck managed to provide. Moreover, because Nelson carefully recorded provenience information for the specimens he collected, including vertebrate remains and bulk sediment samples, and most of these materials remain at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, stratigraphic analyses can still be conducted with these data.
While Nelson's published interpretations of the San Francisco Bay shellmounds (Nelson 1909, 1910) have been regarded as cautious, in contrast to the later well-reknowned insights that emerged from his work in the Southwest (Willey and Sabloff 1974:63), the present report exhibits a concern for many issues that most would associate not with the turn-of-the-century, but with an American archaeology of only the last few decades.
In many respects, Nelson was an archaeologist in advance of his time. This is nowhere more evident than in his analysis of the structure and composition of the Emeryville Shellmound. Based on characteristics of the sediments, such as particle shape and size, orientation, degree of weathering, and the frequency distribution of these variables within and between strata, Nelson attempts to decipher the complex processes that formed the mound. In so doing, Nelson's insights of 1906 foreshadow the current emphasis in archaeology on formation processes and taphonomy. The manuscript contains many such precocious archaeological insights.
Jack M. BroughtonReferences Cited
Ambrose, W. R. (1967). Archaeology and Shell Middens. Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 2:169-87.
Beardsley, R. K. (1948). Culture sequences in central California archaeology. American Antiquity 14, 1-28.
Bennyhoff, J. A. (1986). The Emeryville site, viewed 93 years later. In (F. A. Riddell, Ed.) Symposium: A New Look at Some Old Sites. Archives of California Prehistory No. 6. Salinas: Coyote Press, pp. 65-74.
Bennyhoff, J. A., and Hughes, R. E. (1986). Shell Bead and Ornament Exchange Networks Between California and the Western Great Basin. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 64, Part 2.
Broughton, J. M. (1995). The Emeryville Shell-mound Vertebrate Fauna: Evidence for Late Holocene Resource Depression and Intensification, San Francisco Bay, California. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Washington.
Burkhardt, F., and Smith, S. (Eds.) (1985). The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: Volume 1, 1821-1836. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gifford, E. W. (1916). Composition of California shellmounds. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 12, 1-29.
Howard, H. (1929). The avifauna of the Emeryville Shellmound. University of California Publications in Zoology 32, 302-389.
Nelson, N. C. (1909). Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay region. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 7, 309-356.
(1910). The Ellis Landing shellmound. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 7, 357-426.
(1914). Pueblo Ruins of the Galisteo Basin. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 15, Part 1.
(1916). Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico. American Anthropologist 18, 159-80.
Richards, G. (in press). Brief Communication: Earliest Cranial Surgery in North America. American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Schenck, W. E. (1926). The Emeryville shellmound: Final report. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 23, 147-282.
Tanselle, T. J. (1978). The editing of historical documents. Studies in Bibliography 31, 1-56.
Thoresen, T. H. H. (1975). Paying the piper and calling the tune: The beginnings of Academic Anthropology in California. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 11, 257-75.
Uhle, M. (1907). The Emeryville shellmound. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 7, 1-107.
Willey, G. R., and Sabloff, J. A. (1974). A History of American Archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson.
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