The Maryhill Museum located near Goldendale, Washington, has a display of Plateau stone artifacts. The Plateau Culture Area is the area between the Cascade Mountains and the Rocky Mountains in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Western Montana. From north to south it runs from the Fraser River in the north to the Blue Mountains … Continued
When the Spanish explorer Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo arrived in what was to become Los Angeles in 1542, his ship anchored off Santa Catalina Island where it was greeted by a large canoe filled with Indian people who called themselves kumi.vit, and who would later be identified as the Gabreleño/Gabrielino-Tongva. The Gabreleño-Tongva occupied the area as … Continued
The Southwest Culture Area is a culturally diverse area. Geographically it covers all of Arizona and New Mexico and includes parts of Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas as well as parts of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Much of this area is semi-arid; part of it is true desert (southern Arizona); and part … Continued
In major museums, only a small fraction of the artifacts held by the museum are on display and interpreted for the public. Most of the museum’s artifacts are in vaults where they are available only to researchers. The Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History maintains a Visible Vault in which visitors can view hundreds … Continued
One of the displays in the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, California, is entitled Sacred Earth and subtitled Understanding our past and honoring cultures that thrive today. The nature of California and Southwestern Indian culture began to change with the European invasion four centuries ago. One of the displays in the Museum looks at … Continued
For thousands of years the Cahuilla lived in what would become Southern California. It is not known when the Cahuilla had their first contact with the European explorers/invaders. In 1540, the Spanish explorers Hernando de Alarcón and Melchor Díaz reached the area near present-day Yuma, Arizona. The Spanish had sailed up the Gulf of California … Continued
The Pueblos are the village agriculturists of New Mexico and Northern Arizona. While the Pueblos are usually lumped together in both the anthropological and historical writings as though they are a single cultural group, they are linguistically and culturally divergent. The Pueblos speak six mutually unintelligible languages and occupy more than 30 villages in a … Continued
For tens of thousands of years prior to the European invasion of North America, American Indian people made and used many different kinds of stone tools for hunting, for gathering wild plants, and for processing foods. For the past two centuries or so, non-Indian collectors have been gathering Indian artifacts and displaying them in cabinets … Continued
The Artic Culture Area includes the Aleutian Islands, most of the Alaska Coast, the Canadian Artic, and parts of Greenland. It is an area which can be described as a “cold” desert. Geographer W. Gillies Ross, in his chapter in North American Exploration. Volume 3: A Continent Comprehended, writes: “The North American Arctic is usually … Continued
Veracruz is a region in Mexico’s gulf coastal lowlands. This was the homeland for one of Mesoamerica’s earliest civilizations, the Olmec. The Olmec first emerged about 1500 BCE. Their civilization and their art styles influence many of the later Mesoamerican civilizations. In their Encyclopedia of Ancient Mesoamerica, Margaret Bunson and Stephen Bunson report: “As the … Continued
