Indian Mounds Protected - 'Digging' The Past At Coyote Hills - The Argus - Fremont, California - 20 May 1968

Indian Mounds Protected 

"Digging" The Past At Coyote Hills

Although chain link fencing has been erected to protect three ancient Indian habitations under exploration at the new Coyote Hills Regional Park, the public will have clear views of just what goes on in an archaeological “dig."

And now that the Indian mounds are within a major recreation area, part of the project at Coyote Hills will be to clarify the various findings and other work, so the public will have the opportunity to follow the fascinating story the excavations are unfolding.

Excavation of an Indian mound is a far more orderly and painstaking process than its creation, and it is hoped the fences will prevent vandalism and protect the public from dangerous drop offs created by the digging, an East Bay Regional Park District spokesman said.

WORK AT THE Coyote mounds has been conducted by anthropologists and archaeologists from San Francisco State College, Stanford University, California State College at Hayward and San Jose State College. Co-ordinator of the project is Dr. Adan E. Treganza, chairman of the department of anthropology at San Francisco State.

At first glance, the excavated mounds might make one think someone was planning a sort of crazy basement - for the mounds are not heaps above the ground now but excavations into it, some as deep as 14 feet.

Before excavation, an Indian mound can be spotted by a "platform" of dirt rising six feet or so above surrounding land. That such mounds nourish poison oak in especially lush quantity is often another clue to their presence.

An aerial view of a mound under excavation slightly resembles a sheet cake from which neat, rectangular pieces have been cut by someone preferring the frosted edges. Actually, the "dig' is laid out in a grid pattern of 10-foot squares, each of which may be in various stages of excavation. While shovels and picks are not unknown among archeologists' tools, trowels, brushes and even dental instruments are often more suited to the work.

ALMOST EVERY pebble and grain of material which has already been removed has been put through a one-fourth-inch screen. Anything that didn't go through the screen - it might be an arrowhead, a chunk of charred clay or a fragment of bone - has been meticulously scrutinized. It has been identified, catalogued, filed and whatever else is necessary to obtain from it every possible bit of scientific knowledge and to fit it into the whole picture of the mound's long life.

In the early 1900's, there were about 425 shellmounds recorded around San Francisco Bay. The ones at Coyote Hills are three of the few remaining today. Since the aboriginal Indians of the area left no written histories, the shellmound provides the major record of their culture.

A shellmound is the accumulation of debris and other material, called "midden" by archaeologists, that remains at the site of human habitation. In this area, shellmound is the logical name for it because the diet of the inhabitants consisted largely of shellfish - the shell "garbage" remaining to this day as a principal ingredient of the mound.

The findings from a shellmound can tell what the inhabitants ate, how they killed or gathered their food, how they prepared and stored it, how they died and buried their dead and what they considered ornamental or of spiritual significance.

IT IS BELIEVED that the Coyote shellmounds were continuously occupied from about 2,000 B.C. until nearly the turn of this century. Many burials have been unearthed at the Coyote mounds. Among the thousands of artifacts are such things as sting ray spines (perhaps used as needles or for pinning), shell pendants, birdbone whistles, olivella beads, bone saws used to cut grass or tules, bone awl tips, fragments of mortars and pestles, many varieties of tools, arrowheads and sinker stones.

Unearthed have been the remains of hearths, storage and cooking pits, structures and burials. The dwellings were built, archaeologists surmise, over a saucer-shaped pit in the ground. This was covered by a dome-shaped structure of branches and boughs and thatched with tules and rushes, and then covered with thick mud pounded into the thatch,

What emerges in part is a picture of a people who worked hard at catching and preparing their food, even though they lived in a spot where the "living was easy," and of a people who never threw anything out of the house.

Indian Mounds Protected 'Digging' The Past At Coyote Hills shellmound 20 May 1968, Mon The Argus (Fremont, California) Newspapers.com