Recording and Recognizing Post-1492 Indigenous Sites

Systematic archaeological research into post-1492 Indigenous sites in North America began in the early twentieth century and was most commonly associated with the direct historical approach in which researchers attempted to trace historically documented tribal groups back to precontact times (e.g., Dixon Reference Dixon1913; Steward Reference Steward1942; Wedel Reference Wedel1940). Within this framework, archaeologists often divided sites or site components into three basic temporal categories: prehistoric, protohistoric, and historic. The definitions of these terms have shifted over the intervening decades, but the basic tripartite system continues to be employed throughout the continent. These terms have similar applications in other regions (e.g., Flexner Reference Flexner2014; McNiven and Russell Reference McNiven and Russell2005); however, for the sake of brevity, we focus on North America.

As historical archaeology emerged as a subdiscipline in the 1960s, researchers who focused on the recent past struggled with how to define their field and the sites that fell into its purview. Bernard Fontana (Reference Fontana1965), for example, sought to delineate the realm of what he called “historic sites archaeology.” His classification of five site categories was chronological and followed what he considered to be the “New World historical development: from Indian to non-Indian” (Table 1). Following suit, Robert Schuyler (Reference Schuyler1970:85) argued that “Indigenous sites become historic sites, and thus the subject matter of our discipline [historical archaeology], only when their basic cultural and ecological patterns have been altered by contact and when this is displayed in the archaeological data.” In both instances, the underlying assumption is that sites will include only single components, whereas the primary criterion for determining if Indigenous sites of whatever chronological age are considered historical is whether their material constituents deviated markedly from earlier patterns.

Table 1. Summary of Fontana's (Reference Fontana1965) “Classification of Historic Sites”

Few archaeologists adopted Fontana's classifications verbatim, and in the following years, many used the term “contact” in ways that extended far beyond his strict definition. This usage seems to have grown out of an interest in culture contact more broadly. As discussed by Silliman (Reference Silliman2005), culture contact came to be a conceptually empty shorthand for colonialism in many North American contexts. Emphasis on contact (as opposed to colonialism) focuses archaeological attention on short-term encounters at the expense of understanding long-term entanglements, reifies cultures as static and bounded entities, and downplays the devastating cultural, demographic, and political effects of colonialism for Indigenous nations. Whereas Silliman and others have critiqued the culture contact concept, at a practical level, many scholars (including us) often use the terms “precontact” and “postcontact” as admittedly imperfect replacements for “prehistoric” and “historical” when discussing chronological placement.

Other archaeologists followed in Fontana's footsteps by delineating a contact period that differed in important ways from both earlier and more recent sites. In many cases, sites that fell in this chronological gray area were characterized as protohistoric. Early use of the term was limited to sites that, in the words of Wedel (Reference Wedel1940:297), were “clearly occupied in contact times but not specifically identifiable with recorded villages,” a definition that was echoed by Fontana (Reference Fontana1965; and see Strong Reference Strong1940). Yet even as Wedel was considering protohistoric sites on the Great Plains, archaeologists in California were employing the word differently. Heizer (Reference Heizer1941), for example, used the protohistoric concept to describe sites occupied after the arrival of Europeans but that lacked physical evidence, such as glass beads or iron tools.

Today, “protohistoric” generally defines a period between the first isolated interactions and later times when colonial structures were more fully in place and Native life became a common aspect of the documentary record (Arkush Reference Arkush1990; Ray Reference Ray1978). In some areas, such as the American Southeast or the Great Plains, the period “between contact and colonies” lasted as long as 200 years, and the explicit archaeological study of Indigenous societies during this gap has led to the widespread acceptance of the protohistoric concept (Wesson and Rees Reference Wesson and Rees2002). Not all archaeologists, however, are satisfied with the term. Some argue that it perpetuates the same Eurocentric biases as “prehistory” and allows researchers to ignore the issues of process and power inherent in colonial entanglements (Hull Reference Hull2009:309–310; Mitchell and Scheiber Reference Mitchell, Scheiber, Scheiber and Mitchell2010:13–14; Rubertone Reference Rubertone2000:429; Schmidt and Mrozowski Reference Schmidt and Mrozowski2013:17–19; Silliman Reference Silliman2005:73–74; Trabert Reference Trabert2019:11). Still, many site recording systems use “protohistoric” as a temporal designation.

Classificatory schemes like Fontana's highlight one major challenge in recording North American sites dating to the past 530 years: the conflation of chronology and identity. This central issue has been uncritically codified in regional site recording systems that require archaeologists to assign an ethnic or cultural affiliation. Without explicit guidance on how to assign ethnicity, this question is often left to commonsense distinctions that equate Indigenous sites with prehistory and label sites occupied by people of European descent as historical. In this approach, which we suspect drives a large percentage of in-field recording practices, a lithic scatter or shell midden can unquestionably be classified as prehistoric/Indigenous while a cabin or bottle dump would be classified as historical/Euro-American without strong indication to the contrary. Rather than being harmless and expedient, these decisions have a series of cascading effects on how a particular site is treated, including decisions about field methods, personnel, permits, tribal consultation, laboratory analyses, and interpretation (Beaudoin Reference Beaudoin2016; Byrne Reference Byrne, Harrison and Williamson2004; Colley and Bickford Reference Colley and Bickford1996; Lightfoot Reference Lightfoot1995; McNiven and Russell Reference McNiven and Russell2005).

Thus, when it comes to Indigenous sites occupied after 1492, the issue is one of both recording and recognition. Commonly, the field identification of postcontact Indigenous sites relies on a small set of index artifacts, such as glass beads, that signal the adaptation of new goods into traditional practices (Arkush Reference Arkush1990). Yet this focus may unintentionally restrict the range of sites that can inform on various patterns of postcontact Indigenous presence. Some may be sites of labor, where Native people worked for Euro-Americans and thus used primarily foreign objects, while others may be sites occupied by Native Americans who sought to use colonial material culture as a way of securing social position and autonomy (Silliman Reference Silliman2010; Watkins Reference Watkins, Warner and Purser2017; Yellowhorn Reference Yellowhorn, Gnecco and Lippert2015). Others may be sites where Native people intentionally eschewed the material trappings of colonialism (Heizer Reference Heizer1941; Schneider Reference Schneider2015b). To more fully account for the range of sites used by Native Americans after the arrival of Europeans, we suggest that archaeologists consider a wider variety of material that Native people may have created or consumed in particular contexts as well as chronometric dates that may reveal such sites even in the absence of foreign objects.

At stake here is much more than a turf war between subdisciplines. In most of North America, the archaeology of Indigenous life has traditionally focused almost entirely on periods before Europeans arrived, to the exclusion of postcontact sites or components thereof. Widespread disregard for archaeology of the more recent past supports the mistaken notion that Native Americans vanished early in the colonial period. In this milieu, the sovereignty of contemporary tribal groups may be challenged partly because of the lack of documentation of the time between prehistory and the present day (Schneider Reference Schneider2019). These challenges are not unique to North America. For Australia, Byrne notes an “illusory hiatus is produced by the radical under-recording of Aboriginal post-contact heritage places and a lavish, almost obsessional recording of pre-contact places” (Byrne Reference Byrne, Harrison and Williamson2004:136; and see Colley and Bickford Reference Colley and Bickford1996). Ultimately, the misrecognition and misrecording of sites of long-term Indigenous presence reinforces the logic of settler colonialism and eliminates narratives of Indigenous survivance from the scope of “future histories” (Borck Reference Borck2018; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2001).

Site Recording Practices in Marin County, California

To assess the magnitude of the problem stemming from the misrecognition and misrecording of sites related to long-term indigenous presence, we examined the paper trail for archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Marin County encompasses roughly 1,300 km² of land north of the Golden Gate, between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. This area is an excellent location for a study of archaeological categories because it has a long history of Indigenous-colonial interactions.

Initial encounters with Indigenous Coast Miwok people likely occurred in 1579 when Francis Drake and his crew spent several weeks in the region, but firm archaeological evidence of this landfall has thus far eluded researchers. A second encounter occurred a few years later, in 1595, when Sebastian Rodríguez Cermeño and his crew were temporarily marooned near Point Reyes after their ship, the San Agustín, sank in a storm. Coast Miwok people salvaged timbers and ceramics from the San Agustín, providing clear material correlates in local archaeological sites (Lightfoot and Simmons Reference Lightfoot and Simmons1998; Russell Reference Russell2011). Nearly 200 years later, in the 1770s, the Spanish began actively colonizing the San Francisco Bay region. Proselytization of Native groups living on the Marin Peninsula began almost immediately, and missions and other European settlements were established there by the 1810s. However, Coast Miwok people maintained important connections to the landscape and resided continuously at several autonomous villages from precontact times well into the nineteenth century (Schneider Reference Schneider2015b; Schneider and Panich Reference Schneider and Panich2019).

Archaeologists have been recording Native American sites in Marin County for more than a century. The first systematic attempts were Nels Nelson's surveys of the early 1900s (Nelson Reference Nelson1907, Reference Nelson1909) in which he documented dozens of shell mounds and shell middens along the Pacific and Bay coasts of the Marin Peninsula. Later academic investigations in the county are associated primarily with efforts to locate materials associated with the sixteenth-century landfalls of Drake and Cermeño, as well as a spate of masters’ theses from San Francisco State University during the 1970s. Although the region escaped much of the suburban construction boom that affected archaeological sites across the San Francisco Bay area in the second half of the twentieth century, numerous CRM projects have been conducted in the past 50 years. These have largely focused on the more densely populated coastal strips.

Unearthing Patterns of Coast Miwok Presence

The colonial entanglements of central California, and the San Francisco Bay region in particular, have been the source of many ethnohistorical and archaeological studies. One common interpretation drawn from the analysis of mission baptismal records is that Native Californians steadily abandoned their settlements in an ever-expanding arc that swept from the core Spanish mission establishments outward into numerous Indigenous homelands. The effect, according to the interpretation of historical documents alone, was a landscape “empty of villages” by the 1830s (Milliken Reference Milliken1995:200; and see Madley Reference Madley2019). Recent archaeological research directly contradicts this model. At mission sites, the analysis of obsidian and shell beads has demonstrated widespread patterns of exchange and material conveyance that linked Native mission residents to their compatriots living beyond the reach of the mission bell (Arkush Reference Arkush2011; Panich Reference Panich2014, Reference Panich2016; Panich, Griffin, and Schneider Reference Panich, Griffin and Schneider2018). Similarly, scholars have documented how Native Californians maintained a presence in their homelands at a range of sites across the colonial-period landscape (Byrd et al. Reference Byrd, Dearmond and Engbring2018; Lightfoot et al. Reference Lightfoot, Gonzalez and Schneider2009; Nelson Reference Nelson2017; Panich and Schneider Reference Panich and Schneider2015; Schneider Reference Schneider2015a, Reference Schneider2015b; Schneider and Panich Reference Schneider and Panich2019).

In Marin County, most archaeological work during the twentieth century built upon and perpetuated unfounded assumptions about Coast Miwok extinction drawn from the historical record. The earliest research specifically targeted shell middens and shell mounds, leading to the strong coastal distribution of sites in our study (Figure 1). Though Nelson (Reference Nelson1909:347) noted that some residents recalled Native people living on local shell-bearing sites as late as the 1870s, he exemplified an early preference for single component “prehistoric” sites, and his actual site records for Marin County seldom mention colonial-era or later cultural constituents. This pattern, which was repeated for several decades, reinforced the association of these sites with purely precontact occupation. Past recording practices reflect both the primacy given to the historical record by some archaeologists and deeply entrenched subdisciplinary boundaries between prehistoric and historical archaeology. Taken together, these trends have led to an underrecording of post-1579 Indigenous sites in the region and a concomitant underappreciation of the complexities of long-term Coast Miwok presence. We discuss the results chronologically, proceeding along the five consolidated TPQs generated from our review of site records and reports: 1595, 1775, 1825, 1850, and 1930 (see Table 3).

Figure 1. Sites with evidence of postcontact Indigenous site use in Marin County, California.

Our study found roughly 20 sites recorded as having evidence of social or material engagements with Cermeño and his crew in 1595 (and possibly Drake's voyage some years earlier). Within the documentary record, most of these earliest sites seem to have warranted mention only because they relate to key events in the Euro-American history of California. These sites fall under the traditional definition of protohistoric (Lightfoot and Simmons Reference Lightfoot and Simmons1998), but only about half are classified as such in the CHRIS database. Schuyler (Reference Schuyler1970:85) argues that these coastal sites are “still prehistoric” and that the “intrusive artifacts” obtained from Europeans are only useful for the purposes of placing them in precontact chronologies. We contend, however, that the artifacts did not enter the sites by themselves; rather, they were chosen and brought there by Coast Miwok people engaged in culturally specific practices (Russell Reference Russell2011). A narrow adherence to temporal categorization and subdisciplinary boundaries in which these sites would be categorized as strictly prehistoric obscures Indigenous agency and would effectively erase these early encounters in the regional site inventory.

Nearly two centuries later, Europeans returned to Marin County to recruit Coast Miwok people to newly established Spanish missions. Sites dating from this time (ca. 1775) again served as handy indexes of Euro-American history for regional archaeologists. For instance, a report from one shell mound, CA-MRN-115, described artifacts such as obsidian projectile points and shell pendants, typically associated with the Late Period, before speculating that the residents of the site may have been “taken to one of the Spanish missions” circa 1800 (Meighan Reference Meighan1953:5). Another example is CA-MRN-10, a shell mound that Nelson recorded as the birthplace (but not residence) of Chief Marin, a notable Coast Miwok leader during the mission period. These snippets from the archaeological paper trail demonstrate how archaeologists effectively wrote Native Californians out of the recent past. This erasure was both chronological and spatial, as early recorders implicitly precluded the reuse of sites as part of Indigenous mobility or refuge from colonial impositions. That both sites (CA-MRN-10 and CA-MRN-115) are categorized solely as prehistoric in the CHRIS database perpetuates this bias. Similar patterns of site recording have limited archaeological understanding of Indigenous presence in colonial contexts and urban areas elsewhere (Irish and Goward Reference Irish and Goward2012).

These enduring assumptions about where and when to expect Indigenous people also extend to the types of materials we anticipate finding at postcontact Native American sites. Schneider's reanalysis of CA-MRN-115 and study of two neighboring shell mounds (CA-MRN-114 and CA-MRN-328) demonstrate how an expanded approach to site recognition can reveal patterns that challenge the conventional wisdom about regional site use and reuse (Schneider Reference Schneider2015b). Delivering a story quite unlike that of abandonment previously attributed to CA-MRN-115, careful parsing of radiocarbon and obsidian hydration dates from all three sites suggests continued site use by Coast Miwok people even in the absence of typical colonial-period index artifacts such as glass beads. In fact, less than a quarter of all 122 post-1579 Coast Miwok sites in our sample were reported as containing glass beads (n = 28). While this figure is no doubt limited by the field methods employed by site recorders (e.g., conducting surface survey only or using relatively large mesh size for subsurface testing), a slightly larger number (n = 31) produced radiocarbon and/or obsidian hydration dates that pointed toward Indigenous occupation after the onset of Spanish colonialism in the region during the 1770s. Given that most archaeological sites in Marin County, and elsewhere, have not been subject to dating programs, we suspect that these kinds of sites are underrepresented in our sample.

Other sites defy traditional archaeological expectations by containing a large array of diagnostic artifacts despite late occupational dates (ca. 1825) and proximity to colonial settlements. Site CA-MRN-138, for example, is thought to be the village of Cotomko'tca, from which 42 people were baptized at Mission San Francisco in 1808. Mission San Rafael was founded just 6.5 km south of CA-MRN-138 in 1817, and one additional baptism of an individual from Cotomko'tca was recorded there in 1821 (Panich and Schneider Reference Panich and Schneider2015:55). In traditional approaches to the postcontact landscape (e.g., Milliken Reference Milliken1995), this final baptismal record would signal the end of that village community; and as a site, CA-MRN-138 is officially classified as prehistoric only. However, archaeological excavations there in the 1970s revealed an assortment of nineteenth-century items, such as bottle glass, domesticated animal bone, shell buttons, and metal implements alongside a flaked glass projectile point, a flaked obsidian cross, glass beads, and a phoenix button—the latter of which indicates site use into the 1820s or later. CA-MRN-138 also contained the full complement of Late Period artifacts, although the associations with the postcontact material remain unclear (Slaymaker Reference Slaymaker1977). Sites like Cotomko'tca are unfortunate examples of how archaeological practices obscure the ways Coast Miwok people, like other Indigenous groups, maintained connections to ancestral sites despite the impacts of colonialism.

By the 1840s, Native Californians faced new challenges as the United States took political control of the region, with California gaining statehood in 1850. Marin County sites occupied by Indigenous people after this time include some interesting hints at continued presence near growing Euro-American settlements. These include sites CA-MRN-529 and CA-MRN-530, where archaeologists recovered postcontact obsidian tools, as revealed by hydration dating, as well as a metal crucifix and late red-on-white, or Cornaline d'Aleppo, glass beads (Clark et al. Reference Clark, Wiberg, Ambro and Holman1992, Reference Clark, Bieling and Psota1995). This group also includes Echa-tamal (CA-MRN-402), in the central peninsula, where Coast Miwok families lived until the 1880s (Dietz Reference Dietz1976). Perhaps not surprisingly, all three sites (CA-MRN-402, -529, and -530) are categorized as prehistoric only in the CHRIS database. Most other Indigenous sites in Marin County that date to the mid-nineteenth century are located to the west, along Tomales Bay. There, Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people occupied numerous villages and campsites, many of which were likely used continuously for centuries. Despite the relatively high visibility of these sites in oral narratives, historical maps, and local histories, archaeologists have largely considered them to be prehistoric, as reflected in site forms and the CHRIS inventory. These include the sites on Toms Point, discussed above, where Native people engaged in entrepreneurial activities with a newly arrived American merchant, as well as a constellation of other sites where Coast Miwok families created safe harbor from the pressures of settler colonialism (Panich, Schneider, and Byram Reference Panich, Schneider and Byram2018; Schneider Reference Schneider, Hull and Douglass2018, Reference Schneider2019; Schneider and Panich Reference Schneider and Panich2019).

Coast Miwok families occupied a final group of sites as recently as 1930, all of them along Tomales Bay. Other contemporaneous sites are no doubt missing in the CHRIS database because archaeologists recorded these sites as single-component shell middens and often overlooked evidence of more recent occupation. One particularly egregious example of this preference for prehistoric sites is CA-MRN-265, recorded by Bryant in Reference Bryant1934. He describes “broken mortars” and a “good specimen of spear head” in the artifact description and casually mentions that an “Indian woman, [Bertha] Campigli, has lived on this site for many years” (Bryant Reference Bryant1934). Like the places mentioned above, CA-MRN-265 is listed only as prehistoric in the CHRIS inventory and remains largely invisible to researchers interested in more recent sites of Indigenous persistence. As discussed by Schneider (Reference Schneider2019), the twentieth-century heritage of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people who continue to visit and live along Tomales Bay is relatively unknown by archaeologists and the general public. A more concerted effort to employ oral narratives and the knowledge of contemporary tribal citizens in the process of site identification and recording could no doubt flesh out the inventory of sites relevant to more recent periods of Indigenous occupation.

Taken together, the identification of sites used by Indigenous people after the arrival of Europeans is part of a broader effort to reverse terminal narratives and what has become an increasingly segregated past. We must also be attentive to what is still missing. At one end of the continuum are places that bear few physical traces (e.g., fishing spots or gathering areas) but nonetheless helped to sustain Coast Miwok communities during difficult periods in the past 250 years. At the other end may be places in the built environment—sites of labor, residence, or even exclusion and persecution. These types of resources have, for the time being at least, slipped through the net of archaeological recording because of enduring disciplinary boundaries and recording practices that continue to equate Indigenous people with the precontact past (Byrne Reference Byrne2003:81–83; Irish and Goward Reference Irish and Goward2012; Silliman Reference Silliman2010).

In contrast, collaboration with local Indigenous groups can illuminate the broader range of places relevant to studies of long-term presence and persistence. One fascinating example from Marin County is a shipwrecked fishing vessel, the Point Reyes, that has become a local tourist attraction even as its ties to twentieth-century Coast Miwok families remain largely unacknowledged (Schneider Reference Schneider2019). Like popular interpretations of the past, site recording systems and associated inventories are biased by a lack of understanding about the ways in which Indigenous people made do across multiple forms of colonialism. This pattern, in turn, serves to undermine the foundation of contemporary tribal groups, including the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, whose ancestors occupied the sites in our study area.

Discussion: Reaffirming Long-Term Indigenous Presence through Archaeology

Our study employed a multifaceted approach to assess the magnitude and implications of the underreporting of postcontact Native Californian sites in one central California county. In so doing, we seek to foreground Indigenous presence without unnecessarily restricting the variable ways that Native people made futures for themselves and their families in colonial contexts. Continuity, in other words, does not mean staying the same (Ghisleni Reference Ghisleni2018).

To operationalize these commitments, archaeologists must be attentive to archaeological patterns that may fall outside our commonsense approaches to recognition and recording. This will mean rethinking the identification of sites from the earliest phases of Indigenous-colonial interaction by moving beyond index artifacts such as glass beads to a more holistic approach that regularly includes chronometric dates (Byrd et al. Reference Byrd, Dearmond and Engbring2018; Schneider Reference Schneider2015b). In other words, archaeologists cannot rely on using prehistoric as a default setting for sites associated with Indigenous people. As we note in our case study, treating all Indigenous sites as prehistoric until proven otherwise has led to some egregious errors in the CHRIS inventory for Marin County, a pattern confirmed by researchers in other areas (Beaudoin Reference Beaudoin2016:18). This is an especially thorny problem for regions where site records force archaeologists to choose either prehistoric or historic—for example, the Intermountain Antiquities Computer System (IMACS) form of the Great Basin region of western North America.Footnote ²

For more recent sites, archaeologists will similarly need to move beyond the narrative of Indigenous decline that suffuses the written record and expand the kinds of material evidence used to mark Indigenous use or residence. Take, for example, the presence of whiteware ceramic sherds in a shell midden. This pattern does not by itself constitute a prehistoric camp with a later Euro-American occupation (an explanation we saw multiple times in Marin County records) but may instead point toward Indigenous people's continued engagement with ancestral sites or even shellfish harvesting by Euro-American settlers. The key to distinguishing between these various possibilities is both a strong familiarity with regional archaeological contexts and, in many cases, collaboration with local descendant communities. As Watkins (Reference Watkins, Warner and Purser2017:133) points out, “Put simply, the same mass-produced objects (or modifications of objects) that are used by Euroamericans can carry very different meanings for Indians.”

Of course, not all areas will have the same material correlates or potential for chronometric dating. At the regional or local level, accounting for a broader range of Indigenous experiences under colonialism requires that academic and CRM archaeologists alike have a thorough understanding of the cultural-historical developments in the areas where they work, including the possibilities of postcontact Indigenous presence. Meaningful collaboration with local tribes is one important step in this direction. Professional societies and government agencies can also establish regionally appropriate research frameworks to help archaeologists critically assess the range of materials potentially related to chronology of site use, ethnicity of site occupants, and other issues. One example is the research design for the greater San Francisco Bay–Delta region developed for the California Department of Transportation, which fully lays out the possibilities of postcontact Indigenous sites in the region (Byrd et al. Reference Byrd, Whitaker, Mikkelsen and Rosenthal2017). Ideally, such regional frameworks will stimulate the rewriting of generic background sections in CRM documents that often confine Indigenous people to precontact and early colonial periods and accordingly restrict how sites are identified, recorded, and evaluated (Byrne Reference Byrne, Harrison and Williamson2004:142–143).

Once archaeologists recognize sites in the field, the second challenge is to record them in ways that do justice to their complex histories. One option in many regions, including California, is to include protohistoric as a category instead of simply using prehistoric and historic. Despite several attempts at standardization, protohistoric still remains a vague catchall that covers “a twilight zone separating the well-documented present from the unwritten prehistoric past” (Wedel Reference Wedel1940:296). As it relates to the recognition of sites, research in the past several decades amply demonstrates that the material correlates of early interaction between Native Americans and Euro-American newcomers are extremely variable across the continent. For example, in some regions, such as the Great Basin, glass beads seem to work well as indicators of what has been termed the protohistoric period (Arkush Reference Arkush1990:30), whereas in Canada, research has shown no direct relationship between chronology and the frequency of foreign goods (Ray Reference Ray1978).

Supporters of the protohistoric designation argue that it can focus our attention on the transitional periods of indirect or infrequent contact—before the full brunt of colonialism was realized in a particular region (Arkush Reference Arkush1990; Wesson and Rees Reference Wesson and Rees2002). In our sample, the term was applied inconsistently and relatively infrequently, suggesting that archaeologists working in Marin County feel ambivalence about the concept. This pattern is even more stark when the search extends to include all nine counties of the San Francisco Bay area. In that larger region, totaling some 18,040 km², the CHRIS inventory lists only 105 resources as protohistoric. Sixty of those are in Sonoma County, an area largely beyond the reach of the Spanish missions and where Native Californians escaped sustained colonial entanglements until deep into the nineteenth century. As with our Marin County sample, a careful parsing of the Bay Area's protohistoric sites includes several that do not conform to the traditional use of the term, including ranches operated by Mexican and Russian colonists as well as a cemetery used in the late mission period at Mission San José. At the level of recording, we contend that the term “protohistoric” is too ambiguous to be useful and is conceptually problematic for reasons discussed above (Rubertone Reference Rubertone2000:429; Schmidt and Mrozowski Reference Schmidt and Mrozowski2013:17–19; Silliman Reference Silliman2005:73–74; Trabert Reference Trabert2019:11).

Yet simply excising “protohistoric” from our vocabulary does not solve the problem of how to classify sites occupied by Native Americans after 1492. We are wary of introducing new terms into the literature and of using existing ones in idiosyncratic ways—just witness the fate of Fontana's site types or even the phrase “historic sites archaeology.” However, existing terms are clearly inadequate. Temporal classifications like “contact” or “historical” can unwittingly obfuscate issues of power and erase long-term cultural trajectories, and for many contexts, it makes sense to classify such sites as colonial (Silliman Reference Silliman2005). However, not all sites were in fact colonial, as noted by archaeologists working in regions where Native Americans and newcomers developed distinct patterns of interaction prior to or along the margins of more full-fledged colonial systems (Schurr Reference Schurr2010; and see Jordan Reference Jordan, Ferris, Harrison and Wilcox2014). Some researchers have applied the concept of “pericolonial,” suggesting that the term may help archaeologists capture the unique experiences of people who navigated the indirect effects of colonialism as opposed to those who experienced it firsthand (Acabado Reference Acabado2017; Trabert Reference Trabert2019).

A more straightforward solution is to focus on calendar years rather than the conceptually loaded and chronologically variable prehistoric-protohistoric-historic sequence, at least at the level of field recording. That is, archaeologists can use temporally diagnostic artifacts or chronometric dates to list a site's likely age range(s), particularly given that most sites are recorded during the inventory or evaluation phase, when information might be limited to what can be gleaned from reconnaissance survey or preliminary subsurface testing programs. A calendrical approach may be particularly useful for regions, like the North American Plains, where Indigenous people were not subject to the full brunt of settler colonialism until relatively recently and where archaeologists find the standard prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad limiting (Scheiber and Finley Reference Scheiber, Finley and Pauketat2012; Trabert Reference Trabert2019).

The major benefit of chronologically categorizing sites by calendric dates is that it effectively decouples the intertwined questions of chronology and ethnicity that risk relegating Indigenous sites and associated lives to the shadows of prehistory. Instead, the baseline record would point to constellations of places in use at given periods and over time, patterns that could then be used to generate regionally appropriate research questions about postcontact Indigenous presence. Through the use of multiple lines of evidence, including temporally diagnostic artifacts and chronometric dates, a calendric approach would also allow for the more robust recording of multicomponent sites. This, in turn, might more fully capture the various ways that Indigenous people used ancestral sites after the arrival of Europeans—potentially unobtrusive patterns that have often gone unrecorded in existing regional site inventories.

The calendric approach can, in many contexts, be appended to expanded regional culture historical chronologies. Liebmann (Reference Liebmann, Oland, Hart and Frink2012), for example, points out that simply referring to the “historic period” limits our understanding of the variability of Indigenous action under successive colonial regimes, suggesting that the existing Pecos Classification of the Pueblo Southwest be expanded to include a Pueblo VI period that covers the period 1848–present. A similar amendment has been proposed for the Yuman Complex of Baja California (Porcayo Michelini Reference Porcayo Michelini2018). In our writing on colonial central California, we typically subdivide time into the mission period, Mexican period, and American period, even as we grudgingly use the terms “precontact” and “postcontact” as general temporal signposts. Here, using calendar dates instead of or in tandem with expanded regionally-specific chronological periods may help to decenter the primacy given to colonial powers and reaffirm long-term Indigenous presence.

These changes, however, will require substantial commitment from state historic preservation offices and others to modify existing forms and associated databases. In California, for example, the CHRIS database is organized along the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad, while the site forms that are used to capture chronological data in the field provide confusing and contradictory options, as discussed above. The Archaeological Site Record does offer a series of date ranges beginning with 1542 to 1769 (the period that encapsulates the first European voyages to the region until the founding of the missions). Yet the use of these ranges for Indigenous sites is not specifically mandated, and the form provides no parallel structure for sites occupied earlier (California Office of Historic Preservation 1995:15). Moving forward, chronological classification could be simplified by moving calendric date ranges to the Primary Record, which is filled out for all resources, most often during a project's inventory phase. Because chronometric dates may only be collected during evaluation and/or mitigation, we recommend close collaboration with local tribes and descendant communities during project planning to help characterize ancestral sites.

We recognize that these solutions are not perfect, and archaeologists interested in working toward a more nuanced account of Indigenous places, practices, and temporalities should acknowledge that our attempts are likely to fall short in various ways. As noted by Gnecco and Langebaek (Reference Gnecco, Langebaek, Gnecco and Langebaek2014:v), “Accepting that extant typologies order the world, that they reduce it to manageable proportions, does not mean that we should also accept that it only fits in them and that we cannot invent new categories, new ways to interpret, and new analytical avenues.” We present these thoughts as one step in this direction.