March 2004 - Society for California Archaeology

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30 Articles Early Investigations: Predictive Models and Archaeological Survey The site of El Presidio de San Francisco is unusual in that both the quadrangle site itself and the surrounding landscape have been managed since 1847 by Federal agencies. It thus provides an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the presidial settlement from a holistic perspective, one in which the presidio’s main quadrangle is viewed as the military, economic, and administrative nucleus of a much broader network of ancillary fortifications, residential areas, infrastructure facilities, and agricultural and resource extraction operations. My preparations for the Tennessee Hollow Watershed Archaeology Project began in 1996. Then a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I approached National Park Service archaeologist Leo Barker with a proposal to conduct an archaeological survey of lands within the Presidio of San Francisco to try to identify the remains of these extramural activities and households. Working from Barker’s models of predicted locations of archaeological resources at the Presidio of San Francisco (Barker 1989, Barker 1992), we identified the valley floor of the Tennessee Hollow Watershed as a promising area for further research. The Tennessee Hollow Watershed is a sheltered valley located immediately east of El Presidio de San Francisco’s main quadrangle. Tennessee Hollow is rich in both historical and ecological significance. The year-round presence of fresh water supports diverse plant and animal communities. During the Spanish and Mexican periods, the valley floors were used for farming and grazing, and the serpentine bedrock outcrops on some of the watershed’s slopes were quarried for stones used to make the foundations of adobe buildings at El Presidio de San Francisco. Typical of other areas in the present-day park, the valley floor today is a patchwork of intensely developed residential areas interspersed by heavily vegetated open space covered with brush, forest, and grasslands. Earlier archaeological survey at the Presidio of San Francisco found that surface visibility in the park is near zero (Ivey 1991). Ultimately, I chose to use shovel probe survey as a method to detect colonial-era sites. The shovel probe survey of the valley floor was completed in the summers of 1997 and 1998, with students from the University of California, Berkeley serving as field crew (Voss 1999). (Figure 2) Our methods were straightforward: having divided the valley floor into several survey zones using both natural and cultural features, we excavated shovel probes at the nodes of a thirty-foot grid. Each probe was excavated to a diameter of twelve inches and to a depth of twenty-four inches; excavated soils were screened through 1/8” mesh to recover any artifacts that might be present. Because of the indurated, clay-rich soil found in the valley floor, this process was very labor-intensive – on average, each survey crew member was able to cover only about 0.15 acre per day. Despite this slow pace, the shovel probe survey method was highly effective in identifying the locations of near-surface deposits that would not have been detected with the naked eye. In all, three Spanish-colonial/Mexican period deposits were discovered (Figure 3). The general location of one residential area – El Polín Springs – was known through historic documents, but the other two deposits – named the MacArthur Avenue deposit and the Lovers Lane Bridge deposit – are not recorded in any historic sources and would not have been discovered without systematic subsurface survey. Artifacts collected from the shovel probe survey indicated the research promise of the deposits. They included many artifacts typical of Spanish-colonial deposits: construction tile tejas and ladrillos, household ceramics such as majolicas, galeras, and British creamwares and pearlwares, wrought ferrous artifacts like nails, spikes, and hinges; and bottle glass. In addition the survey recovered artifacts typically associated with colonial-era Native Californian lifeways: flaked stone and flaked glass artifacts and debitage, fragments of groundstone tools, glass beads, and cut and shaped shell artifacts. Current Excavations: Reconstructing Life in the Valley The Tennessee Hollow Watershed Archaeology Project is currently scheduled for five years. Our efforts are centered on two of the three deposits discovered during the 1997-1998 survey: El Polín Springs and Lovers Lane Bridge (unfortunately it appears that much of the MacArthur Avenue deposit has been disturbed by modern construction, limiting its research potential). We plan to excavate for two summers at each site – first, a series of test excavations, followed by areal exposures and data recovery excavations of the deposits encountered by the test excavations. El Polín Springs We began this research at El Polín Springs (Figure 4). El Polín is a bowl-shaped valley located at the southern end of the watershed, with at least three springs that emerge from the valley slope and gather into a small stream. This historically-important water source is located only a short five-minute walk from the main quadrangle along the trail that used to lead from the Presidio to Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores). As noted above, El Polín Springs is the only deposit in the valley for which historical documentation exists. From archival studies, we know that by the 1810s, El Polín had become the home of a large extended colonial family headed by Marcos Briones and at least three of his adult daughters, María de Guadalupe Briones (married to Calendario Miramontes), Juana Briones (married to Apolinario Miranda), SCA Newsletter 38(1)
31 Articles As noted above, the shovel probe survey recovered numerous artifacts related to traditional Native Californian material culture: debris from crafting flaked chert tools, a cut and shaped trapezoidal abalone shell, and fragments of groundstone tools. From military documents, Milliken (1995) has shown that there were many Native Californians who labored at colonial El Presidio de San Francisco. It appears that some of these may have worked and perhaps lived at El Polín Springs alongside the Briones family. Our Summer 2003 research at El Polín Springs used a dispersed pattern of test excavations to develop baseline stratigraphic information about the deposits located there. Using density plots of different classes of artifacts recovered through the shovel probe survey, test units were placed in Figure 3: Map showing the locations of archaeological deposits discovered during the 1997-1998 shovel probe survey. Figure 2: UC Berkeley graduate student Erica Radewagen excavating a shovel probe in 1998. and the widow María de la Luz. Marcos Briones and his daughters all had large families, and at least thirty children were raised at El Polín Springs. We don’t know why the Briones family chose to live at El Polín rather than in the main quadrangle with the rest of the colonial settlers. Marcos Briones’s wife, Maria Ygnacia Ysadora Tapía, had just died, and some people that I have talked to have suggested that perhaps the family wanted to be together. Others have pointed attention to the fact that the women in the Briones family were noted healers, midwives, and herbalists, and that they may have wanted to live at El Polín Springs because of the diversity of plants there. I also think it is possible that the Briones family was stationed at El Polín Springs by the Spanish-colonial military, perhaps to oversee or coordinate farming, ranching, and quarrying activities in the valley. While historic research provides much information about the Briones family, it is largely silent about the other people who contributed to the El Polín Springs deposit: Native Californians. SCA Newsletter 38(1)
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March 2004 - Society for California Archaeology

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