Environmental Impact Statement - Sonoma Land Trust

California Department of Fish and Game
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Section 3.13. Cultural Resources
Because the proposed wetland restoration must comply with NEPA and Section
106 of the NHPA, federal significance criteria are also applied in the following
analysis. For federal projects, cultural resource significance is evaluated in terms
of eligibility for listing in the NRHP. NRHP criteria for eligibility are defined as
follows:
The quality of significance in American history, architecture, archeology,
and culture is present in districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects of
state and local importance that possess integrity of location, design, setting,
materials, workmanship, feeling and association, and that:
A. are associated with events that have made a contribution to the broad
pattern of our history;
B. are associated with the lives of people significant in our past;
C. embody the distinct characteristics of a type, period, or method of
construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high
artistic values, or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity
whose components may lack individual distinction; or
D. have yielded, or are likely to yield, information important in prehistory
or history (36 CFR 60.4).
Affected Environment
Prehistory
Archaeological investigations in the San Francisco Bay Area were initiated under
the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology Department
in 1902, when Max Uhle began the first excavation at the Emeryville
Shellmound in Alameda County. Nels C. Nelson was the first archaeologist to
survey the coastline of San Francisco Bay, including the Sonoma County. Nelson
conducted a survey of the Bay Area between 1906 and 1908 during which he
documented 425 shellmounds along the coast from the Russian River in Sonoma
County to Half Moon Bay in San Mateo County (Nelson 1909). There are
numerous Nelson shellmounds located within a short distance of the Project area,
to the north and southwest. Nelson also performed the first investigations at three
shellmounds in eastern Marin County in 1909 and 1910. However, archaeology
in Marin County and the Bay Area as a whole remained largely unexplored until
the 1940s and later.
Results from previous archaeological investigations near the project area and the
surrounding region have shown that the San Francisco Bay Area was inhabited
by mobile hunter-gatherers. Over time, their foraging strategies became more
focused on the locally obtainable resources, and their lives became increasingly
more sedentary. Fredrickson and Bennyhoff developed a taxonomic sequence
that defined three basic cultural patterns—the Windmiller Pattern, the Berkeley
Pattern, and the Augustine Pattern—throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and
Sears Point Wetland and Watershed Restoration
Project Final Environmental Impact
Report/Environmental Impact Statement
3.13-6
April 2012