THE MOUNDS OF ALAMEDA.
The paper which was read on Monday by Mr. Theodore H. Hittell before the Academy of Sciences on the kitchen middens in Alameda County increases our knowledge of those interesting historical remains. The existence of the middens was known long ago. They were noticed by the padres in the last century. But thus far they have furnished little material for the archæologist. They are simply mounds consisting of oyster shells mingled with a few clam shells - the refuse of the meals on which the aboriginal Indians lived. They are, in fact, reproductions of the Danish shell heaps which have been so often described, and of the mounds which have been examined on the shores of the Andaman Islands.
The mound which Mr. Hittell studied was on the estate of the late Peder Sather, in the town of Alameda, about half a mile west of San Leandro Bay and about a mile southeast of the extremity of the estuary of San Antonio. In constructing a street railroad a cut seven feet deep and about twenty feet wide was made through it. It is in this cut the shells were found in fact the mound was exclusively composed of them. They demonstrate, of course, that the Indians who lived on that part of the coast lived mainly on shellfish, and that they were in the habit of throwing the shells into a heap when they had finished the meal.
But a few other facts, of which we are not yet in a position to estimate the possible importance, are also demonstrated by Mr. Hittell's explorations. In the first place the shell which is the main constituent of the mound is that of the common California oyster (Ostrea lurida), but it is much larger than the same oyster of the present day. Precisely the same observation has been made on the oysters in the Danish shell mounds; the shells are larger thad are found in that part of the Baltic at present. The query is suggested, Has the shellfish deteriorated in size since the mounds were heaped up?
Again, in the Danish mounds the oyster-shells are mingled with the bones of the bull, beaver, great auk and seal, while no such bones have been found in the mounds of Alameda County; and no stone axes have been dug out of the latter, though they were abundant in the Danish mounds and are found in the prehistoric mounds of the central portions of this country. It cannot be said that the Alameda lndians were unacquainted with the art of working in store, for stone medicine-tubes, hollowed throughout like a whistle or a blowpipe, are not infrequent. These discrepancies naturally suggest a variety of hypotheses. It seems very curious that a race which was capable of making a hollow tube of stone should not have fashioned stope axes to cut down the live oaks which surrounded them, when they must have been in need of wood for many purposes, especially as the cognate races on the other side of the mountains made excellent axes which did good work in woodcraft.
Here questions of chronology arise. Major Powell in a paper published four or five years ago suggested that the civilization - such as it was - of the Indians of Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin did not antedate the arrival of white men on this continent by a long period. He seemed to think that the elaborate mounds which have been so carefully studied might not be older than the fifteenth or, at any rate, the fourteenth century. Scientific men on this coast are disposed to allow our Indians a still smaller claim to antiquity. Professor Davidson has been heard to say that we have no Indian relics older than the eighteenth or the seventeenth century. But if they were so very recent - people of yesterday, so to speak - how came it that they have no stone axes? Here we enter the domain of ancient geography, California is probably the youngest of the States, as her geological formation and the incomplete work of creation in the Colorado desert demonstrate. This peninsula on which we live is a modern improvement. Not very long ago the surf of the Pacific broke on the shore of Alameda. Did the shell mounds date from the period when the present State of California was slowly taking shape under the influence of lateral pressure, decaying igneous force and the insatiate voracity of the sea? This is a problem which students of archæology may find it interesting to study.
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